FROM NOWHERE
Artists, Writers, and the Precognitive Imagination

by Eric Wargo

Trade Paperback, 408 Pages

$24.95, ISBN: 978-1-949501-33-9

Genre(s): Psychic Abilities

Creativity Is Time Travel. Literally.

Artists and writers very often predict future events in their work. Skeptics dismiss these anomalies, but what if they hold the key to the creative imagination?
In this mind-bending book, the 40,000-year history of art is reconsidered as a literally prophetic enterprise. From Ice Age cave paintings to the novels of Virginia Woolf and Philip K. Dick, the films of Werner Herzog and David Lynch, and even the songs of The Beatles, Wargo makes a case for the inherently time-defying nature of inspiration. Creators often channel their own futures—and the future of their culture—in their art. It is an entirely new way of thinking about one of humanity’s oldest questions: Where do new ideas come from?

About the Author:

Eric Wargo has a PhD in anthropology from Emory University and is the author of two previous books on precognition: Precognitive Dreamwork and the Long Self and the acclaimed Time Loops. He also writes about science fiction, consciousness, and parapsychology at his popular blog, The Nightshirt.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Move Along, Nothing to See Here

PART ONE: PRECOGNITION AND INSPIRATION
1. Sculptor of the Impossible: Michael Richards, 9/11, and the Science of Precognition
2. Steampunk Connection: Extraordinary Inspiration and the Empire of Meanwhile
3. No Backstory: Precognition and the Unconscious
4. Falling from the Sky: Trauma, Free Will, and the Prophetic Sublime

PART TWO: ARTISTS AND SHAMANS, SEPARATED AT BIRTH
5. “They Have Been Here!”: Cave Art and Long Superhumanity
6. Life in the Deep C: Virginia Woolf and Cine-Chronicity
7. Arise O Prophet! Work My Will:Andrei Tarkovsky in the Fourth Bunker
8. From Nothing: Cy Twombly, Time Machines, and Creation ex Nihilo

PART THREE: ALIENATED MAJESTY
9. Culture in Reverse: Future-Plagiarism and the Anxiety of Precognitive Influence
10. Aliens and Archetypes: From the Collective Unconscious to the Unified Field
11. VALIS-PM: Philip K. Dick, Jacques Vallée, and Control Systems
12. Tradition and Tesseract: Culture, Synchronicity, and Prophecy

Afterword: Living Creatures, Flying Blenders,and Long Selves
Notes
Index

What they're saying:

“There are books, and then there are books. The latter change one’s life, change how one thinks of pretty much everything. From Nowhere is such a book ... that turns one around to think anew, to be inspired from the future as well as by the past. I have been turned around, temporally and existentially, by Eric Wargo.” —Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of How to Think Impossibly

“Eric Wargo’s work is not only on the cultural cutting edge, his pen is the knife that is cutting the edge. From Nowhere is impossible to put down. ... After speaking with and interviewing many creative scientists and artists, I believe that Wargo’s explanation is not only accurate, but game changing. He’s right. If this framework was taught in schools of art (and science!), the consequences would be transformative.” —D. W. Pasulka, author of Encounters

"...I do not think that Eric Wargo is crazy, not at all. There is something real here, a hypothesis of where imagination comes from, specifically in creative people, where dreams, visions, and insights function as time loops, transferring future experiences back in time to the artist’s younger self. An idea may seem to spring from nowhere, but, if Wargo is right, it is more like tomorrow's newspaper is produced by an old-school printing press, until it develops and lands in our imagination. One thing is very clear after reading From Nowhere; it starts internal processes, maybe hypothetically even relays future information through the inspirations that come from reading it!" — Fred Andersson, Society for Physical Reserach