Kemialliset Ystävät

This band from Finland has become one of my musical passions. Part of a feral Finnish folk movement that has been percolating for a while, their music is dreamy and surreal. They also have moments of inspired cacaphony. Although considered as part of the "freak folk" movement by some, there is something about their sound that reminds me of early '80s experimental underground music. Imagine if Cabaret Voltaire or Rhythm & Noise played folk music. I could listen to them for hours.

Aquarius Records (a great place to shop for their music) sums it up quite nicely: "A sort of Krautrock meets seventies pagan folk meets minimal drone meets free rock meets everything else. No wonder it all sounds so good. It's little purloined scraps of everything we love, woven haphazardly together into gorgeous rambling and meandering sonic explorations. Banjos accompany wavering falsetto vocals, shuffling seasick rhythms underpin wild songbird like melodies and fluttery flutes, buzzing distorted guitars rumble beneath full on harmony pop vocals, warped and warbly organs and woodwinds nestle up against the clattery clang of kitchen sink percussion. It all sounds so perfectly imperfect together. Dreamy and melancholy, stumbly and goofy, dark and brooding, woozy and hypnotic, innocent and playful, exuberant and festive, creepy and bizarre, pretty and darn near perfect."

Enjoy!

Strange But Untrue: Dr. Strange & the Lesser Book of the Vishanti

Move aside, Necronomicon, there's another genuine fake book of occult secrets in town, The Lesser Book of the Vishanti penned by catherine yronwode with nagasiva yronwode (neither of them capitalize their names on this site so I won't either). It's the grimoire used by Steve Ditko's comic book creation, Dr. Stephen Strange.


Dr. Strange, shown here in a portion of a black light poster, urges fans to consider set and setting before turning on.

As catherine relates on her site,"Although we were on welfare during that year [1977] at Little Creek, i did not want to be a drain on society. I decided that the two hundred dollars per month i received was "pay" for a job of my choice -- and what i chose to do was to pick up litter along the roadsides and to create a topical index to the entirety of my favourite comic book series, Strange Tales and Dr. Strange. Within the fictional world of these comic books, there was a grimoire or spell-book called The Book of the Vishanti, and so, in homage to two famous real-world grimoires, the Key of Solomon and the Lesser Key of Solomon, i called my project The Lesser Book of the Vishanti."

As with H.P. Lovecraft's fictional grimoire, The Necronomicon, art imitated art. So here are the secrets for the Orb of Agamatto, the Satan Sphere, the Wand of Watoomb and so much more, all indexed by comic book. Consider just one of the "spells" offered here:

"In the name of the Dread Dormammu --
in the name of the All-Seeing Agamotto --
by the Powers that dwell in Darkness --
I summon the Hosts of Hoggoth!
Lead me to the source of Evil!
Obey the words of Dr. Strange!"

We are warned in a note that "this is said to be a 'dangerous' incantation."

Beyond this, we are shown the real-life origins of Steve Ditko's "Eye of Agamatto," which turns out to be "a fairly common kind of amulet found in the Buddhist regions of Northern India. Called "The Eye of Buddha," it is a pendant, worn on a necklace cord as an apotropaic charm to ward off the Evil Eye (Mal Occhio) and to protect the bearer from misfortune." Wow. And guess what? The sponsor of this site, The Lucky Mojo Curio Company, is standing by to sell you your own "Eye of Buddha."

So enjoy this spuriously genuine book of arcane spells, True Believers. There's no better way to put a little hokey in your pocus.

The Cat with Hands!

Have a creepy Hallowe'en!

70th Anniversary of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" Broadcast

This Hallowe'en (technically October 30, 1938) will be the 70th anniversary of the "War of the Worlds" broadcast by Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air. The dramatization/ hoax generated incredible panic and remains a fascinating study in the power of mass meda to shape public perception. Broadcast without commercial interruption, this adaptation of H.G. Wells' classic science fiction novel convinced many that New Jersey was being attacked by Martian weapons of mass destruction, a mere 65 years before what The Village Voice called "the biggest media hoax since Y2K" led the United States into war with Iraq on false pretences.

An incredible retrospective of the original broadcast and subsequent tribute broadcasts that created similar panic and even deaths can be found at WYNC's Radiolab site. I can't recommend this hour-long show highly enough and used portions of it to craft my own plunderphonic review of this great hoax. Another revealing broadcast offers a meeting between Orson Welles and H.G. Wells in San Antonio, Texas a couple of years after the incident. Orson is touchingly deferential to H.G., and lauds him for his prophetic writings.



It's interesting, too, that Welles noted in F for Fake (itself a tasty meme filled with tricks of various kinds) that the UFO phenomenon followed his broadcast. With tongue-in-cheek, in the nine minute trailer for F for Fake he even suggests that his broadcast was done at the behest of powerful minds from outer space!

If not the original example of culture jamming, the War of the Worlds broadcast remains perhaps the most breath-taking and troubling. Manipulation through media is as old as the history of public relations. Orson Welles' trick or treat remains a powerful warning about the power of media to bend belief so that it accommodates even the most absurd fiction. It's a lesson to which governments and corporations paid close attention and it has served them very well. Sadly, the popular imagination remains very susceptible to Martians of the mind.

Keep watching the skies. And mind the airwaves, while you're at it.

Spiel for a River to Nowhere

From 1979 to 1981, I worked 10 hour swing-shifts at LaSalle's Adventure at Six Flags Over Texas. Riverboats, which have now been outfitted as swamp boats in East Texas, traveled on tracks in a large circle, beginning and ending at the dock. As I wrote in "Riverboat Ritualization," a piece published in the Moorish Science Monitor in the '90s, the continuous rounds left a heavy imprint in my brain, and the entire theme park experience gave me added insight into gnosticism and the simulacrum in the fiction of Philip K. Dick.

Ostensibly a narrative about the French exploration of Texas by LaSalle, the riverboat spiel that follows was constantly being tweaked and rewritten by those using it, to make it funnier or to simply avoid boredom of repitition. This version from 1978, the one I was handed as a yellow-tag trainee, is reprinted here for fun. The ride was closed in 1982 because it wasn't a "people mover." I had the honor of delivering the very last spiel, "the nasty version," to a crew of associates and friends.

For those interested in actual history, the journals of Henri Joutel are in print and make fascinating reading about LaSalle's last voyage (he was shot in a mutiny somewhere in North Texas near the Trinity River).

In the meantime, enjoy the ride!



Good Day my friends, this is your captain speaking and I’d

like to welcome you all aboard my French Riverboat. Before we leave

the dock may I ask you all to please keep your hands and arms inside

the boat, since you never know when you might need them to swim back

to shore should the boat sink, or the captain abandon ship. The

brave at heart aboard this ship are volunteers for a very dangerous

mission as we’ll be traveling along waters much like the rivers the

French Explorer LaSalle travelled on in his search for the mouth of

the Mississippi. In addition to the Spanish, who had laid claim to

Texas when LaSalle first left a colony at Matagorda Bay, we will also

encounter both friendly and no doubt many unfriendly indian tribes

along our journey. And here is early proof of that, it would seem

that the indians have already attacked this French encampment and

that trapper has met with the same unfortunate end that many settlers

met within this wild new land.




Perhaps the most formidable four legged enemies that early settlers

faced in Texas were the gray wolves. Settlements or camps attacked by

the indians are soon taken over by the wolves, who often scatter the

bones up to a mile. Although not always as dangerous as Indians, the

Spanish had already laid claim that the territory of Texas when LaSalle

established his first colony, but the discovery of a French camp in

Spanish territory did cause the Spanish to step up their mission

programs. Mission San Francisco De Los Tajas was built in 1690 by

Father Massonet with the help of friendly indians from the area.

Many such missions are protected by Spanish Forts such as the one

up ahead. Since they fly the Spanish Flag and we’re French, we must

try to slip by unnoticed. Luckily there’s no one in the watch

tower so if you’ll all be very quiet we’ll try to make it by

....But oh no! That Spanish soldier has spotted us...they’ve

opened fire! Full speed ahead. Careful, a near miss on the port

side, another near miss, prepare to abandon ship! Women and children

first, after the captain of course. But wait! They’ve ceased fire,

it would seem as though the spanish can’t hit the broad side of a

little French Riverboat.


Over to my right you’ll see something that’s becoming very common

along the Rivers in Texas. Trading Posts appear to be an excellent

way to make friends with the indians.



Trading posts have also inspired many trappers to come to Texas.

A trapper friend of mine, Francious knows this area well, and he’s

usually around here so keep an eye out for him. There he is now in

the top of that tree...I’ll ask him in French if its safe to go on...

(away from mike) "Francious my friend, is it safe to go on?" Unfortun-

ately he’s shaking his head no, which in French means no - but, the

rivers too narrow to turn around right here, and besides, I’m not

ready to risk another pass by those Spanish cannons. So we’ll continue

on for the glory of France. I believe Francious has a small camp

along here, and perhaps we’ll be able to stop for some good food and

company.


But no, there will be no stopping here, the camp is under attack

by indians and I’m afraid we’re caught in the crossfire! Everybody

quick, down in the boat - we’ll duck now and ask questions later.



Those bullets are real my friends, have no doubt, real enough

to ruin even those barrels of good French Wine. They really know

how to hit a frenchman where it hurts, don't they? In the wine

barrels!


Mon Amis we are now entering the most dangerous part of our

journey, swamp lands, infested with huge hungry alligators. Let me

once again remind you to keep your hands and arms inside the boat

because these gaters just love to be hand fed, and once in the water,

there's not a man alive that can out swim one of these monsters.

What!?! No need for alarm, its just a bear fishing for some dinner in

the river, we probably disturbed him. Quick Look! There's something

moving in the bushes (pointing to port side) I'm sure I saw something

move up there....Look Out! Its an indian war canoe, everybody duck

down! Those arrows are tipped with poison, one scratch could mean

instant death. Luckily they didn't shoot!


On my right you'll see what they were probably trying to protect

an indian burial ground. As you can see indian customs require that

they bury their dead 6 feet above the ground. Burial grounds are

sacred, and trespassers are dealt with severely. Some tribes even

sacrifice a dog, horse, or even a woman with a dead warrior.

With a burial ground here a village can't be far, so we will

try to proceed quietly and carefully along.


And just as I thought, here is the Indian village. That medicine

man is really a priest for the tribe, and there's no tellings what

that dance he's doing is supposed to do; I just hope it's not going

to do it to us!


Luckily, I don't see any warriors around, just young braves

and squaws tanning hides and preparing some of their favorite

dishes, perhaps boiled earth worms and raw fish.

Quiet everyone, over on the shore is a black bear. I hear that

many settlers along the river call the black bear the clown of the

woods, but considering his tone of voice right now, I'd say those

sounds were more like hunger pains than jokes.


Traveling along the river can be very dangerous, but traveling

the shore is next to impossible because of the thick brush and the

many wild animals along the shore.


Here you can see a single bear fighting for his life against

some very dangerous enemies. The wolves are very careful though

because that bear's teeth are very sharp, not to mention the

power in his "bear" hands.


Quick everyone, lean to the port side of the boat; for over

on the starboard is a whirlpool. That poor soul is already on his

way to a watery grave, but you've got to give him credit, he did

save that piece of drowning wood.


To the left a pack of beavers, an important source of income to

many trappers and a source of trouble to many captains as they often

pose a menace to navigation. Look Out! Timber... Well, it that

tree had been a little longer this boat and this trip would have

been alot shorter.


I hope you are all brave for ahead lies unchartered waters and

there is no way of telling just what might be waiting for us.

Look... Indians! On both sides of the shore, everyone bravely

River and quickly duck! I'd say those Indians have only one goal, to get

a head. So it's full speed ahead for us. But wait! A waterfall

with a solid rock wall behind it. I'm afraid our journey has come

to an end if you'll all prepare to abandon ship on the count of

three, One... Two... WAIT! The waterfall has parted, the rock wall

is opening. I believe we've stumbled on an ancient Indian treasure

cave. Many explorers gave their lives in search of caves such as

this containing Indian gold and treasure.


Perhaps we should reconsider and turn back, but I'm afraid

we can't! The doors have closed and we're trapped inside. Look,

to the right, treasure! But don't take any, it's being guarded by

that skeleton. Oh no! more trouble, a rock wall ahead... but no,

I see light, the wall is swinging open. The Indians have rewarded

us with our lives for not stealing their treasure.


And there is the flag of France flying proudly above Ft. St.

Louis. Viva la France, we've made it back to safety!

I want to thank you all for being such a brave crew and accom-

panying your not-so-brave captain on this very dangerous journey. I

hope you enjoy the rest of your stay at Six Flags Over Texas and come

back and see us again real soon.


Now as we approach the dock, please keep your hands and arms inside

the boat, wait till we come to a complete safe stop, then exit on the

dock side only. You'll find it a little drier there.

On the dock we should find a beautiful glamorous French sailor

girl (or handsome, de bonair, exciting French sailor) to help you out

of the boat. But as you can see she (or he) didn't show up ... so

(name of host or hostess) will have to do.

River



Now mates and matees, the time has come to say mersi beau

coup and au re voir: which is Texas French for thank you very

much... and abandon ship before she sinks.

Perspective

"'As the ordeal went on, it became clear to certain of these
balloonists, observing from above and poised ever upon a cusp of
mortal danger, how much the modern State depended for its survival on
maintaining a condition of permanent siege--through the systematic
encirclement of populations, the starvation of bodies and spirits, the
relentless degradation of civility until citizen was turned against
citizen, even to the point of committing atrocities like those of the
infamous pétroleurs of Paris. When the Sieges ended, these
balloonists chose to fly on ...'"

-(Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon, Pt. I, Ch. 2, p. 19f.)

Callithumped, Jugged & Punked: Part 3

What are we to make of the crayon palimpsest of Bohemian subcultures, each one scrawling its boast over the lyrics of a previous generation, creating colorful forms that, while new, remain indebted to older eccentricities? The true iconoclast is something rare. Instead, it’s all too common for the avant garde to pillage its predecessors, sometimes with a sly wink and satirical flourish. In this way, what once was obscure is revealed in a new form or even popularized. Rock & Roll is struck from old Blues. Punk attitude owes much to the irreverence and DIY approach of old jug bands and forgotten roots music.

Is that the train that they speak of
The one I heard in my younger days
All great bluesmen have rode her
I'm jumping up gonna ride that train.

This from “Version City” by The Clash; here and there are nods to tradition, admissions of musical mummery, and signs of transitional forms. Following the punk genealogy set forth by Jeffrey Lewis, we find two precursors of punk that seem unlikely at first blush: The Holy Modal Rounders and The Fugs.

"The Rounders were the first really bent traditional band. And the first traditionally-based band that was not trying to sound like an old record," Pete Stampfel explained to Folk Roots in 1995. Together with Steve Weber. Stampfel formed the nucleus of a collection of bands real, imagined and loosely associated: MacGrundy’s Old Timey Wool Thumpers, The Strict Temperance String Band of Lower Delancey Street, The Temporal Worth High Steppers, The Motherfucker Creek Babyrapers and The Hoochie Koochie Dream Band among many others. The two met in 1963 and started gigging. Their first album, The Holy Modal Rounders, came out in 1964 and boasts the first use of the word “psychedelic” in pop music lyrics. In a natural twist of fate, the two played with The Fugs briefly in 1965.

The Holy Modal Rounders offer an interesting glimpse of musical mutation as an agent, or perhaps symptom, of sub cultural change. Their first two albums were comprised of covers of old standards, most, if not all, from Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, which boasted a cover by occultist Robert Fludd and selections from the dawn of electronic recording. Smith was a most peculiar man and a famous Thelemite who, though not a member of the occult Ordo Templi Orientis, was nevertheless consecrated as a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica in 1986. In addition to being an occultist and ethnomusicologist, he was also a painter and renowned experimental film-maker. Perhaps cognizant of his own role as musical catalyst, when he received a Chairman’s Merit Award at the Grammy Awards ceremony he said,” "I'm glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America changed by music."

Pete Stampfel and Pete Weber, the original duo at the core of The Holy Modal Rounders, were no strangers to musical eccentricity. It might be safe to suggest that they were a vital part of the chain of transmission from Harry Smith in changing America through music.


In October 1962 whilst in New York, Stampfel played with Tiny Tim and Phil Ochs at a Greenwich Village Club called The Third Side. Stampfel and Weber met in New York in March 1963 and they started to gig as a duo at places like The Cafe Flamenco and The Playhouse Theatre under a series of bizarre names like the Total Quintessence Stomach Pumpers

In the period that followed Stampfel formed The Hoochie Koochie Dream Band and then, in late 1974, The Unholy Modal Rounders, who together with Michael Hurley and friends recorded the Have Moicy album, which was one of their better efforts and superior to Last Round, which was actually recorded in 1976.

There is a sort of anarchic heathen energy in the music of the Holy Modal Rounders. Even as their music is firmly rooted in the wildness found in the Smith anthology and elsewhere, their sound also pointed the way forward to the punk rebellion, squeezing juice from the older radical sounds that inspired them and allowing it to ferment. In creating a bridge from the American folk sound to the raucous rebellion and irony in which punk was steeped, they changed the stream of musical history. Their contemporaries, The Fugs, carried the torch forward into realms of freakish vulgarity, perversion and Yippie absurdity, and their legacy will be explored in Part 4 of this series

'pataphysical moments

Bound to Lose- The Holy Modal Rounders

The Death of Mystery?

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”

-Albert Einstein

There is a shell-game going on and it isn’t pretty.

That hoary old bogeyman of philosophy, Aleister Crowley, once suggested that his exploration of occult and visionary states involved “the methods of science, the aim of religion.” It’s an interesting idea which is a bit analogous to the scientific method, though admittedly more subjective: try these methods and find out whether they work or not. The “methods” in question involve, at the very least, the manipulation of consciousness and will.

Lately, the often-useful and sometimes dreadful tool known as science has been making a stand as a philosophy, something referred to as Scientism. Authors like Richard Dawkins are, in a peculiar and limited way, analyzing religion through the lens of science. Or are they? Sometimes this critique is little more than an interdisciplinary bait-and-switch. Myth is dismissed after being scrutinized as history. Hearsay miracles are dismissed for their scientific irreproducibility. For the most part, “religion” is typified by the most violent and cantankerous extremists and fundamentalists. It’s as if one set out to critique science and considered only the hydrogen bomb, daisy-cutter missiles, mustard gas, napalm, Agent Orange, pollution, Chernobyl and the neutron bomb which kills people but leaves property standing. Surely this would be recognized as a straw man argument, a selective consideration of the achievements of science. But if not, think of the vast millions of bodies that could be laid at the foot of scientific discovery where it is arguably uncoupled from ethics. In a similar way, religion is selectively considered for its failures, for its political actions and for the insubstantial nature of the wilder claims of world scripture.

Largely absent from the ostensible critique is an element of religion which has actually been considered by science: religious experience. And while religious experience has been analyzed and compared with temporal lobe epilepsy, that is just one among many possible causes. And the factors that catalyze alleged religious experience are legion, if you will pardon the expression. Fasting, meditation, sex, drugs, visionary plants & fungi, music, dancing, pain and sensory deprivation can all be on the list of practices/ factors that induce what William James, the father of modern psychology, referred to as “the varieties of religious experience.” James enjoyed his own seemingly transcendental experience of the divine through experimentation with laughing gas; the methods of science, the aim of religion. But scientists like the late Dr. John Lilly, who pioneered studies in both altered states of consciousness and human/ dolphin communications, have been castigated by the scientific community for violating the objective nature of scientific experiment by becoming their own test subjects. And here is the Catch-22 of the matter, our need for another tool which is like the scientific method yet allows for subjective assessment of the content of such experiences. Failing that, the scientific study of religious experience bogs down at the limits of the tool of science: while neurophysiology can be examined, the content and importance of religious experience is beyond the purview of science. For Scientism, this isn’t a problem. Scientism presumes the veracity of the most dysfunctional model as a way of dismissing the subject. Consider the once-popular “psychotomimetic” model of psychedelic drug effects, the idea that visionary experience mimics psychosis. Consider the draconian difficulty of legitimately studying psychedelics in the United States, despite the fact that both LSD and MDMA have been successfully employed in psychotherapy. For Scientism, which not being science is free to indulge in speculative value judgments, these phenomena can be dismissed without further study as psychosis and hallucination. One wonders when science will presume to challenge the existence of love and pass sentence on its subjective bliss and exaltation.

Before we succumb to the religion of Scientism, with its untested assumptions and beliefs about what will or won’t be proven in the future, perhaps we should employ an interdisciplinary approach to not only religion but to ostensible transcendental experiences. This would include scientific methodology where appropriate: in understanding the neurophysiology and somatic mechanisms of ecstatic and religious experience. But it would also include literary criticism, mythology (not in its popularized denigrated sense), subjective experiment and praxis, psychology, ethnobotany, psychoacoustics, and statistical analysis.

Ultimately, we must look for the return of mystery, like believers waiting for a resurrection. As much as Scientism would presume to what we may one day know, it may be more important at this juncture to remind ourselves of the vastness of what we don’t know and in some cases perhaps cannot know. As humbling as the experience may be, our ignorance is unimaginable and we owe respect to what remains to be seen or known, mystery. There will always be an eagerness to dogmatically accept the death of mystery in order to relax in faux certainty. And as admittedly useful and revolutionary as science has been, one need only consider the succession of new scientific models replacing old to see that we are still far from fabled certainty in so many areas. New hypotheses are being studied with regard to issues as fundamental as time or the Big Bang.

If we seek Mystery in its oldest historical guise, we will find the old Mystery Religions with their secretive initiations which, an increasing body of evidence suggests, offered psychedelic potions as sacraments. Little more than a few hundred years ago, what we now recognize as science was inextricably intertwined with magic. For example, we know now that Isaac Newton spent as much time studying alchemy as he did regarding what we would now call science. While the Enlightenment summarily banished the occult and welcomed a world assured of knowledge discovered through modern science, we are left wondering what might have occurred if science had remained coupled with ethics and mystery. Even the oft-mischaracterized Luddites simply desired scientific progress that would be conjoined with quality of life, something that seems quite reasonable in light of our world filled with poisonous by-products and weapons of mass destruction. We have learned how to kill with obscene efficiency but in too many areas we haven’t learned to live or to maximize pleasure and ecstatic experience. Yet progress, which often seems hideously regressive with hindsight, marches on like some capricious god, conferring incredible benefits on one hand and ever-greater means of mass-murder on the other. Dogmatic certainty is not the monopoly of the religious fundamentalists, nor does it seem that we can logically look to science for answers that may be not only subjective but deeply personal, requiring more than just one tool. As much as Scientism would suggest otherwise, Mystery lives and continues to generate enigmatic surprises. In doing so, it should confer a deep sense of humility on any thinking person. And wrangling with Mystery and its meaning or lack thereof will continue to be an interdisciplinary effort that can only be carried out by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of tools like scientific methodology.

Forty Years After The Prisoner's Last Episode: Have We Escaped?

(Attached Spoiler Warnings apply only to video embeds, not to the text)



It has been 40 years since that landmark of creative television, The Prisoner, concluded its brief run with the climactic episode Fallout. This series finale was so controversial that reportedly series creator and star Patrick McGoohan had to hide out to avoid being attacked in the streets. Just as Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow was cited by an imprisoned Timothy Leary as “…an authoritative text on how to understand and neutralize the Cybervillians, the secret police of all nations...[that] exposes the weirdo psychology, the kinky sociology, the ruthless inhumanism of all the national espionage combines,” so does The Prisoner offer similar methods of resistance, revelation and escape from any given year’s Village and new Number 2.

It seems redundant to mention that a show about a retired secret agent who was “disappeared” to a place where he was held and interrogated without due process was remarkably prophetic. In the intervening four decades, ubiquitous surveillance and loss of privacy have become the norm. Even the show’s torture, though often science fictional, strikes a chord with any human rights advocates considering current events. But it was McGoohan’s genius to transcend the pop conventions of 1960s media spy fare in offering something more allegorical, surreal and cerebral. The Prisoner’s influence on other media, most notably on Lost, should be apparent. The short-lived Nowhere Man and even story arcs in Buffy the Vampire Slayer owe much to the show.

While McGoohan has resisted the many different interpretations and expressed disdain for cultish fans, structurally and symbolically his show seems akin to multi-layered Sufi teaching-stories. Pointedly, its last episode pay-off is notable for its defiance of genre conventions, its somewhat dated freak-out exposition, and daunting openness to interpretation. The very aspects which angered most fans are also the things that give the show universality while, in open reverence for the right of “the individual to be individual,” offering so much in the way of individual interpretation, depending on what one brings to the viewing experience. It has often been noted that McGoohan artfully deals with themes that will be familiar to any reader of Philip K. Dick, George Orwell and Franz Kafka. But it is seldom mentioned that there is much here for consideration of those who cherish the works of Jilaladin Rumi, Ibn Arabi and Aleister Crowley.

SPOILER WARNING


Four decades later, The Prisoner is more relevant than ever. Our shrinking Global Village stands exposed. The ways in which we are all, in one way or another, prisoners are all too apparent. Freedom seems like an ever-receding goal. Escape has been sublimated and replaced by escapism. Too often we rail at external authority without due consideration for the authority that is implicit in our own domestic apathy or the corporate media simulacrum that dictates everything from what’s newsworthy to fashion and behavior.


SPOILER WARNING


Like the best art, The Prisoner will change and teach us if we let it. Its dystopian dream remains all too familiar. Its techniques for resistance and escape remain useful. And its challenge to be a free individual is timeless and inspirational.

The door to your cell is open. What will you do now?

Bougainville, Diderot and The Earthly Paradise

Denis Diderot accompanied Louis Antoine de Bougainville, the explorer, navigator and mathematician, on his global circumnavigation/ voyage to the South Pacific. I became interested in Bougainville's voyage because my father walked in his footsteps as a Marine in World War II and was part of the first wave attack on Bougainville's eponymous island. Diderot's essay takes Bougainville's arrival at Tahiti as its point of departure.

Diderot's essay, with its colorful dialogues, seems to be a mixture of French Utopianism (many of the French, including Gaugin, regarded the South Pacific islands as the real Earthly Paradise), social satire of European mores, and philosophical/ anthropological observations. Bougainville's voyage and Diderot's commentary sparked Jean-Jacques Rousseau's thinking and led to the sterotype of the "noble savage." Pointed observations regarding sex and religion are particularly interesting and often amusing. The entire essay can be found here or collected in The Libertine Reader.

As this excerpt opens, the ship's chaplain has succumbed to the charms of Orou's youngest daughter, despite earlier protestations. His exchange with Orou continues:

OROU: "I see my daughter is well satisfied with thee and I thank thee. But pray tell me what is this word religion, that thou didst repeat so often and with so much pain?"

The chaplain, after reflecting for a moment, answered: "Who made thy cabin and its articles of furniture?"
OROU: I did.
CHAPLAIN: Very well. We believe that this world and all it contains is the work of a workman.
OROU: Then he has feet, hands and a head?
CHAPLAIN: No.
OROU: Where does he live?
CHAPLAIN: Everywhere.
OROU: Here too?
CHAPLAIN: Yes.
OROU: We have never seen him.
CHAPLAIN: He is not to be seen.
OROU: A poor sort of father! He must be old. For he must be at least as old as his handiwork.
CHAPLAIN: He never grows old. He has spoken to our ancestors: he has given them laws: and has prescribed the manner in which he would be honoured. He has ordained for them certain actions as good and forbidden them others as bad.
OROU: I see, and one of those actions he has forbidden as bad is to sleep with a woman or girl. Why then has he made two sexes?
CHAPLAIN: For union, but on certain fixed conditions and after certain preliminary ceremonies, as a result of which a man belongs to a woman and belongs to her alone. A woman belongs to a man and belongs to a man alone.
OROU: For their whole life?
CHAPLAIN: For their whole life.
OROU: So that if a woman slept with anyone else than her husband and a husband with anyone else than his wife -- but the case can never arise, for since the workman is there and disapproves of it, he knows how to stop them.
CHAPLAIN: No, he lets them go their way, and they sin against the law of God (for that is what we call the great workman) and the law of the land; and they commit a crime.
OROU: I should hate to offend you with my remarks, but with your permission, I will give you my opinion.
CHAPLAIN: Go on.
OROU: I find these singular precepts opposed to nature and contrary to reason: they needs must multiply the number of crimes and continually annoy the old workman, who has made everything without the help of head, hands, or tools, who exists everywhere and is to be seen nowhere: who endures to-day and to-morrow and is never a day the older: who commands and is never obeyed: who can prevent and does not do so. These precepts are contrary to nature because they presuppose that a thinking, feeling, free being can be the property of another like himself. Upon what can this right be founded? Do you not see that, in your country, you have mixed up two different things? That which has neither feeling, thought, desire nor will, and which one can take, keep or exchange, without its suffering or complaining; and that which cannot be exchanged or acquired: which has liberty, will, desires: which can give itself and refuse itself for a single instant, or for ever: which complains and suffers: which could not become a mere article of commerce without its character being forgotten and violence done to its nature? These precepts are contrary to the general law of existence. Does anything really appear to thee more senseless than a precept which refuses to admit the change which is in ourselves: which insists on a constancy which has no counterpart in us and which violates the liberty of male and female, by chaining them for ever one to the other: more senseless than a constancy which confines the most capricious of pleasures to a single person: than an oath of immutability between two fleshly beings in the face of a heaven which is not a moment the same: under caverns that threaten ruin: beneath a rock that falls in powder: at the foot of a tree that cracks: upon a stone that breaks in pieces? Believe me, you have made the condition of men worse than that of animals. I know not who thy great workman is. But I am glad he has never spoken to our fathers and I hope he never speaks to our children. For he might say the same silly things to them and they might be silly enough to believe him. Yesterday at supper thou toldest of magistrates and priests, whose authority rules your conduct. But tell me, are they lords of good and evil? Can they make what is just unjust, and what is unjust just? Does it rest with them to label good actions harmful and harmful actions innocent or useful? Thou canst not well admit it, for then there would be neither true nor false, good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, except in so far as thy great workman, thy magistrates and priests thought good to say so. Then from one moment to another thou wouldst be compelled to change thy opinion and thy conduct. One day one of thy three masters would give the order kill and thou wouldst be obliged, in conscience, to kill. Another day steal and thou wouldst have to steal; or, Do not eat this fruit and thou wouldst not dare eat it; or, I forbid thee this fruit or animal and thou couldst not touch it. There is no goodness they could not forbid thee: no wickedness they could not order. And where wouldst thou be if thy three masters, falling out among themselves, took it into their heads to permit, enjoin and forbid the same thing as I am sure often happens? Then to please the priest, thou must needs quarrel with the magistrate: to satisfy the magistrate, thou must anger the great workman; and to be agreeable to the great workman, turn thy back on nature. Knowest thou what will happen? Thou willst get to despise all three! be neither man, citizen, nor pious person: thou wilt be nothing: on bad terms with all sorts of authority and with thyself: wicked, tormented in heart: persecuted by thy insensate masters: and wretched as I saw thee yesterday evening when I presented my wife and daughters to thee and thou didst cry out: "But my religion, but my calling." Dost thou wish to know what is good and bad in all times and all places? Cling to the nature of things and actions: to thy relations with those like thee: to the influence of thy conduct on thy private convenience and the public good. Thou art mad if thou thinkest there be anything, high or low, in the universe which can supplement or be subtracted from the law of nature. Her eternal will is that good be preferred to evil and public to private good. Thou mayest aver the opposite but thou wilt not be obeyed. Thou wilt multiply the number of malefactors and those made wretched by fear, punishment or remorse. Thou wilt deprave men's consciences and corrupt their minds. They will no longer know what to do or what to avoid. Troubled in their state of innocence, calm in sin, they will have lost their pole-star on their journey. Answer me frankly. In spite of the express order of thy three legislators, does a young man in your country never sleep with a girl without their permission?
CHAPLAIN: I should lie, if I asserted it.
OROU: And does the woman, who has sworn to belong only to her husband, never give herself to another?
CHAPLAIN: Nothing is commoner.
OROU: In these cases thy legislators either do or do not take action. If they do, they are wild beasts who make war on nature. If not, they are imbeciles, who have exposed their authority to contempt by a useless prohibition.
CHAPLAIN: The guilty ones, when they escape the severity of the law, are chastised by public disapproval.
OROU:: You mean that justice functions through the absence of common sense in a whole nation: that a maniacal public opinion does duty for the laws.
CHAPLAIN: The girl who has been dishonoured can no longer find a husband.
OROU: Dishonoured! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The faithless wife is more or less despised.
OROU:: Despised! Why?
CHAPLAIN: The young man is called a cowardly seducer.
OROU: Cowardly! A seducer! Why?
CHAPLAIN: Father, mother and children are heart-broken: the flighty husband is a libertine: the betrayed husband shares his wife's disgrace.
OROU:: What a monstrous tissue of extravagances are you detailing to me! And even now thou hast not yet told me everything. For the moment men are allowed to regulate at will notions of justice and property, to endow things with some particular character or deprive them of it arbitrarily, to associate good and bad with certain actions or the reverse, then, by consulting only their own caprice, the men become censorious, vindictive, suspicious, tyrannical, envious, jealous, deceitful, uncomfortable, secretive, dissimulating. They spy, they cheat, they quarrel, they lie. Daughters impose on their parents, husbands on their wives, wives on their husbands. Girls, yes, I am sure of it, girls will suffocate their children: suspicious parents will despise and neglect theirs; mothers will abandon them to the mercy of fate: crime and debauchery will appear in all their forms. I know it all, as well as if I had lived among you. It is so, because it cannot be otherwise: and thy society, which your chief praises for its order, turns out to be only a collection of hypocrites, who secretly stamp the laws under foot: or unfortunates who are themselves the instruments of their own torture by submitting to such laws: or imbeciles in whom prejudice has completely stifled the law of nature: or beings of feeble organism, in whom nature does not claim her rights.
CHAPLAIN: There is a resemblance certainly. So you have no marriage then?
OROU: Yes, we marry.
CHAPLAIN: What is marriage with you?
OROU: Agreement to share the same hut and sleep in the same bed as long as we wish to do so.
CHAPLAIN: And When you wish to no longer?
OROU: We separate.
CHAPLAIN: And what happens to the children?
OROU: Ah, stranger! Thy last question finally reveals to me the profound misery of thy country. Know, my friend, that here the birth of a child is always a source of happiness and its death a subject for regrets and tears. A child is a precious possession because it will become a man. So our care for them is quite different from our care for our plants and animals. The birth of a child is the occasion of domestic and public joy. It means an increase of fortune for the cabin and of strength for the nation, arms and hands the more in Tahiti. We see in him a farmer, a fisherman, a hunter, a soldier, a husband, a father. When a wife passes back from the cabin of her husband to that of her parents, she brings with her the children she had taken as a dowry: a division is made of those born during cohabitation: and as far as possible we share out the males and females so that each one may have about the same number of boys and girls.
CHAPLAIN: But children are for a long time a source of expense before doing any service in return.
OROU: We put aside for their upkeep and as provision for old people one-sixth of all the country's fruits. This tribute follows them everywhere. So you see a Tahitien family becomes richer the larger it grows.
CHAPLAIN: A sixth part!
OROU: Yes. It is a sure way of increasing the population and of interesting it in the respect due to old age and the rearing of children.
CHAPLAIN: Do your married couples sometimes take each other back again?
OROU: Very often. Meanwhile the shortest period of a marriage is from one moon to another.
CHAPLAIN: Unless the woman is with child; then cohabitation lasts at least nine months.
OROU: Thou art mistaken. Paternity like the tribute follows the child everywhere.
CHAPLAIN: Thou hast told me that a woman brings her children as a dowry to her husband?
OROU: Certainly. Take my eldest child, who has three children: they walk: they are healthy: they are handsome: they promise to be strong: when she takes it into her head to marry, she will take them with her; they are hers: her husband will receive them joyfully; and he would be all the more pleased with his wife were she about to have a fourth.
CHAPLAIN: By himself, I presume.
OROU: By himself or somebody else. The more children our daughters have, the more they are in demand. The robuster and stronger our boys are, the richer they are: and so we pay as much attention to preserving our girls from the approach of men and men from dealings with women before the fruitful age as to exhorting them to have children, when the boys have reached the age of puberty and the girls are nubile. You cannot imagine the importance of the service you will have rendered my daughter Thia if you have got her with child. Her mother will no longer say to her each month, "But Thia, what are you thinking about? You do not become pregnant. You are nineteen. You should have had two children already and you have not got any. Who is going to look after you? If you waste your youth like this, what will you do when you are old? Thia, you must have some fault that keep men away. Take yourself in hand, my child. By your age I had had three children."

The Subculture that Wasn't

Last Friday I was visiting with a friend who had just attended Movement: Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival and came back refreshed and effusive about everything she saw and heard. There was something genuinely touching about her enthusiasm, particularly the fact that she was sharing it with me, a longtime loather of rave music in all its micro-categories as well as a notorious cynic with regard to the utopian pretensions of the rave movement.

Rafael Behr unintentionally summed up the rave dilemma in his Guardian comment piece, Where are you, my fellow old ravers? “Imagine a formula for calculating the impact of a subversive youth culture. It would factor in the scale of moral panic, the effectiveness of subsequent hijacking by fashion and music industries and changes in values that were smuggled into the mainstream. Rave would come out as the biggest sell-out ever. Consumerism won hands down.” Indeed, such is the ubiquity of this music that for a few years it has been the staple of Guy Ritchie-style, pretentious action movie soundtracks. For a while it seemed like any kid with a computer was supposed to be a musician and any asshole with a record collection was supposed to be a DJ. It was dizzily wonderful until it became omnipresent and oppressive. Or, as Rafael sums it up,” Electronic dance music is part of Britain's audio furniture. It reverberates in bars and clubs, is the soundtrack to TV shows, adverts and radio jingles. And it always plays in gyms. It was there that I found myself pondering…the peculiar fact that this music was once illicit.”

Our nostalgic friend is specifically referring to Great Britain’s Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which made it illegal to gather and listen to music comprised of repetitive beats. As a long-time freeform disc jockey, I was ever leery of the claims that raves were subversive, but such organized oppression certainly lent that illusion to embattled ravers. Also, it wasn’t really the music that was illicit as much as the widespread use of club drugs, particularly MDMA or “ecstasy.”

Like the ‘50s revival in the ‘70s and the ‘70s revival in the ‘90s, rave music is being recycled by the nostalgia machine. Thirty-something ravers, driven from dingy warehouses, open-air massives and “renegade” parties, are now flocking to dingy or glitzy bars to hear their favorite “illicit” music: oldies.

“But while the aesthetics of the 80s dance revolution colonised popular culture, the political consequence was tiny,” Rafael admits. So thoroughly did rave culture aggressively sell out that it is now the stuff of mainstream culture. Another friend, a keyboard player in a live House music band, told me that there was no such thing as selling out anymore. “That died with the ‘60s. I’m a professional musician. My goal is to sell out.”

It wasn’t more than a few years into the ‘90s that organized raves, by and large, closed ranks and abolished the short-lived tradition of “chill rooms,” where ambient and diverse downbeat music could once be heard. The tyranny of the beat prevailed, despite shrilly spurious claims to diversity. Dance party culture wasn’t really a culture or even a sub-culture. Purged of the incessant tennis-shoe-in-a-dryer beat, what is left? A faint echo of late ‘60s counter-culture garnished in a vaguely warm-fuzzy acronym: PLUR.

My friend who had just made her pilgrimage to Detroit seemed bittersweet about it all. She urged me to reconsider rave music festivals like Movement (which seems to be a most unfortunate choice of names) as being comparable to festivals like Burning Man or Flipside in Texas. And while I don’t doubt that she had some profound epiphany, it’s hard for me to compare rave conferences with DIY camping events that, in essence, do play host to a remarkable variety of music, art and culture. As a long-time observer of Bohemian movements, I can only hope that one day there will once again be viable counter-cultural movements that, even as they draw on inspiration from the past, present us with a startling freshness and purpose that is all too rare these days.

In retrospect, such outbreaks of social magic are inevitably ephemeral. We take for granted that the long festive nights will never end but eventually they do, only to return in another guise over time. It is only when they continue in lock-groove perpetuity that the law of diminishing returns takes over. And when that happens, we are forced to admit that another underground movement has passed or been positioned and merchandized. If we try to cling to it, instead of searching for new forms of expression and resistance, we find ourselves on the treadmill of nostalgia, lost in memory and identified as part of a marketing niche. It is in the unexpectedness of freeform expression that we may find new juxtapositions, gazing beyond the limits of mundane time and space so that all of history is celebrated along with the best speculative future we can conjure. Real diversity hasn’t had its day in court just yet.

Where have all the ravers gone? Where are all the “tribes” that once danced the weekend away in industrial no-go zones? Our forlorn pal Rafael answers these questions, but there is something of the epitaph in his response. “The repetitive beats are everywhere, but the rave generation is invisible. We pound out our hippy idealism on the treadmill.”

Requiem

It was unavoidable. Mobs of old guys are shaking their calloused fists and ranting about the goddamned good ol’ days when punk rock punched a hole in the sky and the ever-patient satellite of VALIS blasted us with its pinkly delicious message of cosmic love and cultural transgression. It was 1974. It was 1980. It was timeless. We were young and we would never die. There was rioting, fucking in the streets, non-musicians releasing amazing albums (which were still spun by specially trained bees out of vinyl with gatefold sleeves that shamed the Renaissance masters, goddammit!) and the unavoidable orgasmic bliss of shaking things up. This immediatist breach, to hear some rant, was the last time that real people made music that was so strange and baffling that Biz assimilation was just impossible. Out there, in the Wasteland where the tire-fires never stopped and the ruins of civilization so-called stood like sarsen stones above the 24/7 freakout, we did the St. Vitus dance and slammed our sweaty bodies together until the low brown clouds glowed with morning light or nuclear terminus. Somewhere in the dim cathode twilight we could still hear the existentialist mumblings of Peter Ivers before he was unceremoniously snuffed-out like a microcosmic cover-version of the heat-death of the universe. We gathered in squalid nightclubs, deranged, full of life, burning brighter and brighter until the inevitable fall, unsustainable but not giving a shit because we were outside of time. It was surely the culmination of an act of magick, decades in the making, weird old Harry Smith plucking the Monochord with a shellac plectrum, shaking feathered sticks and unearthing dinosaur-bones of mad, mad music from the bedrock, from beneath the floor, down there rattling like haints. Who’s down there? The devil! Arne Sarknussem! The Living Heads of Mu! Now we walk through this land of ghosts where well-coiffed fascists wield the razor of public relations, wondering how we lost the secret and when that weapon was turned against us, retooled, moneyed, omnipresent. It’s Crystal Night again. The Buzzcocks were right, seeing far into the hazy expanse of a 4th, 5th and 6th Reich hosted by kinder, gentler Nazis where the occluded spawn of morons would take refuge from genocide and corruption in superficial media-death. Now it seems like a lost dream, as if the Finnegans never woke and would never wake again. When these stories are told, younger eyes roll. There is nothing in their experience like this. The evidence still spins, vital, liberating. The Monochord still vibrates and if you find that foolish, quiet center inside of yourself, it will, sure-as-shit, fill with the old madness of a world gone by. There are techniques to defy mass-mesmerization, free spaces to be seized, inside and out. One day there will be music that, while strangely familiar, will move us in new ways, casting out ancient demons of control and once more setting us on that long, well-traveled road. Drink up, dear souls, for tomorrow may be the day. Like epopts, we will die before death and see with fresh eyes, hear with fresh ears. And the corruption that we shuffle off will fall like black snow, like ashes from the mouth of a harbinger.

Shhhh! Listen now…

Eat a Bowl of Freakies

Today is my birthday and I'm celebrating with the Freakies: Boss Moss, Hamhose, Snorkledorf, Grumble, Goody-Goody, Cowmumble, and Gargle.

10 Most Disturbing Films #5: The Haunting

Robert Wise’s adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s novel, The Haunting of Hill House, remains possibly the best filmed ghost story to this date. It is included here because of Wise’s ability to engage the imaginations of viewers, an art that seems to have been almost forgotten in our tell all/ show all age.


"Hill House", which was Ettington Hall at the time but is now the Ettington Park Hotel.

The premise is an old one: a team of psychic investigators spend the night in a haunted house. But the film (as well as the novel) transcends the stock plot with memorable characters, among which we must include Hill House itself. Filmed in gloriously crepuscular black & white, with some exterior shots completed with infra-red film, The Haunting is claustrophobic, obsessive and gothic without losing is sharp, understated edge. Mousy, awkward protagonist Eleanor Lance (Julie Harris) is seduced by Hill House, its own madness inciting and exacerbating hers. She is drawn into its secret center even as it fills her with dread, just as we are.

It is a tribute to Robert Wise that he was able to use less to make more of an impact. We are frightened by what remains unseen, leaving our imaginations to fill in the blanks. What we hear at times is unsettling and suggestive, more so because it is also muffled and abstract. Humphrey Searle’s score is, by turns, bewitching and chilling, an ideal complement to this shadow-play. Precious few special effects are involved, quite different from the abysmal 1999 remake coughed up by Jan De Bont.

Unlike vintage radio drama, it is hard for film to engage the theater of the mind with the intensity that The Haunting does. It draws us into the shadows where we may hear or feel but seldom see. It invites us to plumb our own darkness and to summon our own ghosts. In doing so, it’s as subtly disturbing as our minds will let it be.

Negativland: It's All in Their Heads

Last Sunday night, I had the rare opportunity to see Negativland in Dallas at the Sons of Herman Hall. I have long enjoyed their provocative releases, lawsuit-related art, and the wit of their sampling compositions.

It was amazing to see their "live radio show" and the cooperative mixing that they do so well. I even put on the blindfold for a while and just listened, though if I hadn't taken if off for the last half of the show, I would have missed some wonderful visual gags. After a while, though, I noticed something missing: laughter.

Granted, there were a few really funny bits scattered throughout the night but ultimately the show, which included a massive amount of spoken samples from religious and secular media, became didactic and even strident. While part of the problem seems to have been that the samples themselves were didactic and strident, the show was reminiscent of those Negativland routines that stop being funny and become bang-on-the-head preachy, a word I use intentionally.

One may forgive the "band" their lapse in thinking that Dallas is still "the tightly clasped buckle on the Bible Belt" rather than the exciting and diverse global city it has become. It was apparent that they considered themselves in enemy territory, albeit with a crowd of friendly fans. While Negativland has often mocked religion to great effect, as with "Christianity is Stupid," the strain of issue polarization seems to have taken its toll. Granted, there were many thought-provoking samples filled with useful advice or ludicrous assertion, but after the 100th repetition of "God is dead," my eyelids started to feel heavy and Sunday night started to feel more like Sunday morning. Specifically, I think that I laughed more when I used to go to church as a kid.

Maybe it's the deadly serious business of thwarting busy-body fundamentalists and violent extremists that sucked the fun out of the room and left Negativland in reactionary black & white mode. The Message, which was pounded into the crowd with tedious regularity, is that religion is "all in your head." That's also the name of the tour, and converts are called "Headites." This would have been mildly amusing had the man one seat away from me not reacted to the show with Holy Roller enthusiasm, nodding and quaking and gesticulating wildy. It was a stark reminder that there is more to this discussion (or presentation) than belief versus atheism. Worse, if the show was any indication, we now have to grapple with the belief atheists have about what believers believe, naturally drawn from the craziest representatives.

Sure, it's all in your head (and mine) but what does that mean, exactly? Presently, science is still addressing fundamentals like the nature of consciousness and the neurophysiology of ostensible mystical experience. Putting it succinctly, we still don't understand our own capacities nor can science adequately address the subjective experiences that are claimed as gnosis, experiences of some Otherness arrived at through various means which cannot be conveyed through speech or text. Pending future findings and methodologies for approaching this dilemma, it's possible to see the emergent New Atheism as a creature that can't seem to shake its own dogmatism, with a sad tendency to ape the very worst aspects of religious fundamentalism. Like Reagan with the "war on drugs," Negativland and the New Atheists have closed the debate for us and wrapped it up with a bow of bombastic mockery.

And so I was shown the error of my own belief that I would be laughing that Sunday night. And the art of Negativland, presented with great skill, ultimately collapsed into polemic rubble of the sort that is now all too familiar to readers of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris. With a few exceptions, the foibles of religion are depicted as if all religionists are crazed hillbillies and mouth-frothing lunatics. In the process Negativland seems to be inaugurating the First United Church of Atheism, the Headites. It would apparently be a gag if it didn't seem so very earnest. With plenty of unexamined assumptions and an Us versus Them mentality, Negativland is coming to your area with the New Dogma. It's as subtle as a blow to the head and about as funny.

Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon

(No worries- 10 Most Disturbing Films will resume soon. Also, look forward to future installments of Callithumped, Jugged and Punked)



Against the Day is unlike any other book I have ever read, and one that defies review. Thomas Pynchon’s latest epic tips the scales, packed with 1,086 pages of wonderful characters, marvels, and a tapestry of themes. Ostensibly a novel of revenge, AtD is also (among many other things) an extended rumination on various kinds of light, from the mundane to the esoteric. As the title implies, this is no glorification of spiritual Illuminism so much as a cautionary tale about excesses of light set against the consolations of night.

Taking place in the years prior to World War I, depicted as a sort of historical tipping point here, AtD explores many fascinating themes: Orphism, anarchism, espionage, the elusive nature of freedom, Utopian dreams, Shambala, secret societies, Tarahumara shamanism, peyote visions, doppelgangers, sexual escapades, emergent plutocracy, time travel, the 4th dimension, Icelandic spar, intelligent dogs, Gnostic inversions, Tarot trumps, super-weapons, Lovecraftian monstrosity, Bogomils, hollow Earth theories, Nicolai Tesla, Central Asia, the set of all sets that have themselves as a member, rembetica, fezzes, ukeleles…

The novel begins with the Chicago Exposition of 1893, and some of the best and funniest writing is devoted to this event. Here we first become aware that although this is a book that begins more than a century ago, it sheds a lot of light on our contemporary world and its problems. Much of Against the Day follows the lives of the Traverse family and their acquaintances. Webb Traverse, the patriarch, is an anarchist dynamiter who is done in by hired guns working for the mining company, the owner of which, Scarsdale Vibe, is the novel’s designated vile plutocrat. The task of vengeance falls to Traverse’s three sons, Kit, Reef and Frank. Traverse’s daughter, Lake, marries Deuce Kindred, the man who shot her pa.

This is an incredibly sprawling and tempestuous read. Erudite passages collide with goofy gags, spontaneous musical numbers and puns. Woven throughout the pages is a hilarious parody of juvenile adventure novels and pulps featuring a zeppelin crew of boy adventurers, the Chums of Chance, inspired by the likes of Tom Swift and Doc Savage. Theosophy is also lampooned as T.W.I.T., the True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys. Then there are the Visitors, who come from the future or possibly another dimension. “They have been crossing here, crossing over, between the worlds, for generations. Our ancestors knew them. Looking back over a thousand years, here is a time when their trespassings onto our shores at last converge, as in a vanishing-point, with those of the first Norse visitors.”

I will admit to my share of bafflement at much of the math, and confusion generated by a multitude of characters that pop in and out of the narrative like prairie dogs. In the beginning, I leaned heavily on the in-progress Pynchon wiki to help decode obscure historical references, foreign phrases and greater context. But in the last few hundred pages, I surrendered to the flow which carried me hither and yon beyond my wildest expectations.

One of the interesting things about finishing this book is rereading reviews of it. It seems that more than a few reviewers didn’t finish reading it and covered their retreats with bluster. One or two actually admit to skimming. Malcolm Jones of Newsweek arguably takes the best approach and serializes his review in an attempt to keep pace with the novel:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15771953/site/newsweek/

Having lived with this book for three months, I can’t imagine reading it on a deadline. It’s accessible even if one doesn’t run all of the references to ground, but I would recommend savoring it and doing a little bit of reference legwork. If it touches on a subject you happen to relish, you will find plenty of delightful in-jokes and references. But even without a compass, you can appreciate this wild and wide-ranging ride, by turns hilarious and horrifying, intimate and cosmic.

For those interested in Pynchon’s meta-fictional innovations, a running theme of doubling is woven through the book, along with the material symbol of doubling, Icelandic spar, which acts as a sort of mystical lens. Toward the end of the novel, the narrative splits off into an alternate fictional “reality,” one in which we discover the destinies of the major characters as they unfold there. Even in this alternate reality, one character makes an escape into yet another reality, where he is informed that he just returned from Shambala. Fans of the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics will find much to enjoy here.

As long as Against the Day is, I didn’t find myself wanting to skim pages or eager for it to be over. I savored the experience to the very last page, enjoying Pynchon’s ability to conjure so much in this play of light and darkness. Ultimately, the experience of reading becomes lysergic, phantasmagorical and transcendental. The novel, like Biblical Leviathan, swallows you whole and spits you out, exhausted but happy to be alive, on some strange beach.

The Esoteric Rocketman

(I will return to the 10 Most Disturbing Films shortly. In the meantime, I offer this literary intermission)

Many years ago, like an amateur rock-climber who impulsively decides to take on a mountain, I tried to read Thomas Pynchon's masterpiece, Gravity's Rainbow (referred to by the 1974 Pulitzer Prize jury as "unreadable, turgid, overwritten, and obscene"). I only made it through about 100 pages, but the challenge whetted my appetite. I enjoy literary puzzles, experiments and challenges, and learning the lessons encrypted in this book became a holy grail for me. I made two more attempts before I finally read the entire novel. I have since read it two more times, the last time with the aid of the invaluable Gravity's Rainbow Companion. Like Huckleberry Finn or Illuminatus!, Gravity's Rainbow is a book that grows with you and rewards your life experience and intellectual expansion. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this novel is the creation of rocket mythology, something Pynchon does with enormous insight inspired, in part, by Jacob Grimm's (of the Brothers Grimm) 4-volume masterpiece, Teutonic Mythology. This is carried out with complexity that falls beyond the scope of this blog, though it is worth mentioning that GR's anti-hero, Tyrone Slothrop (anagram for "sloth or entropy"), while on clandestine assignment in recently liberated France, assumes the identity of Rocketman, complete with a costume of white Zoot suit and conical hat. Among his other heroic duties, he liberates a cache of hash and engages in a pie fight in a hot air balloon. His destiny is bound with the emergent mythology of the rocket and a strange, secret ritual involving rocket 0000 and its payload.

Which brings me to another celebrated rocketman, the scientist/ occultist John Whiteside Parsons featured in "John Carter's" Sex and Rockets (Feral House, 2000). This meticulous study could well stand as a non-fiction sequel to Gravity's Rainbow, concerned as it is with rocket science, alchemy and the crossroads between the two disciplines. While this is plainly a journeyman effort, with uneven though enjoyable writing, the subject is fascinating and the book is exhaustive in telling its tale. The first half of the book concerns itself mainly with John/ Jack Parsons (born under the name Marvel) and his importance to the American rocket program, specifically with reference to the development of solid rocket fuel and JATO (Jet Assisted Take Off) technology that may have helped the allies prevail in WWII. He was also instrumental in the founding of Jet Propulsion Laboratories and a founding partner in Aerojet.

Carter argues convincingly that Parsons is the most important figure in American rocketry, and largely self-taught, at that. Simultaneously, his significance to the occult, specifically the Ordo Templi Orientis that was reconfigured by Aleister Crowley, is denigrated, depicting Parsons as a failed magician whose endeavor to bring about the incarnation of BABALON, the Great Whore of Biblical infamy, also revealed by John Dee in his Enochian workings, was undermined by ego and hubris. That Parsons attempted this with L. Ron Hubbard as his scryer makes the story irresistably juicy, packed with occult melodrama. That Parsons' fame was greater than his accomplishment, at least in the occult realm, is well-argued. However, one is left to wonder at the results of his Great Work. There is speculation that Parsons' BABALON working resulted in the advent of UFOs or the birth of the 1960s counter-culture. That Parsons was apparently swindled by L. Ron Hubbard, identified in Crowley's correspondence as a "confidence trickster," adds elements of sensationalism to the story. Hubbard reportedly took off for Florida with Parsons' girlfriend Betty and a lump sum of his cash, which was to be used to establish a business partnership between the three. Sex & Rockets reprints an explanation from the Church of Scientology alleging that Hubbard was employed to bust up America's hotbed of black magick, bringing Naval Intelligence expertise to the matter. In the end, Parsons is largely undone and in debt. Disillusioned with the OTO as the chariot of Thelema (Crowley's Hermetic philosophy summarized, "Do what Thou Wilt shall be the whole of the Law. Love is the Law, Love under Will") he quit the order, while remaining a student of the more secretive A.:A.:. Ultimately, he illegitimately took credit for the grade of Magister Templi. Having lived an incredibly full life, Parsons was killed by a mysterious explosion in 1952, followed by his mother's suicide by sleeping pill overdose mere hours later. Later, rather unsavory details are alleged concerning an incestuous relationship that existed between Parsons, his mother and her dog.

Much of the fun of this book is reading about the many notable figures who passed in and out of Parsons' life and his rooming house for eccentrics and free love, that also accommodated the Agape Lodge of the OTO for a time. Actor John Carradine is said to have read poetry at the opening of this Lodge, something missing in the details of the recently reviewed Hollywood's Hellfire Club (also Feral House). L. Ron Hubbard's pre-Scientology role is provocative and mysterious. A Who's Who of American rocket scientists is featured. The politics, trickery and melodrama of the Agape Lodge is diverting. And the book does a wonderful job of following Parsons' partner, "elemental" Marjorie Cameron, through a burgeoning counterculture, featuring cameos from Kenneth Anger to Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell.

In the end, the reader is left with several questions and the sense that the story has many holes left to be filled. The connection between Parsons' innovations in rocketry and his occult/ alchemical enthusiasms remains largely unexplored, though hinted at here and there. His legacy seems to be primarily literary and should remain safe with the publication of the concisely stated essay "Freedom is a Two-Edged Sword," which considers Crowley's magickal philosophy of Thelema as the vehicle for radical anarcho-libertarianism. His enceavors to bring about the incarnation of BABALON are discounted by Crowley, though, and Carter concludes that magically, Parsons was an egotistical failure who offers an object lesson for aspiring occultists. At the same time, though, he is credited with working harder than most at his occult work.

This is a fascinating study, amply documented (sometimes distractingly so), that carries a strange cargo of hard science and deep esotericism, much as Gravity's Rainbow does in its fictional framework. In the end, the failures of Parsons are as interesting as his successes. And his legacy seems to be a missing chapter of the rocket mythology painstakingingly created/ depicted by Pynchon. In closing, Carter offers a fitting epigraph from a science fiction story to the effect that Parsons was instrumental in bringing about the end of the world but the beginning of the galaxy. For me, the story is one best closed with the lyrics of the '70s band Jigsaw:

You, You've Blown It All Sky High
Our Love Had Wings To Fly
We Could Have Touched The Sky
You've Blown It All Sky High

Up Round I've Flown
Then Down Down Like a Stone

10 Most Disturbing Films #3: Sweet Movie

Years before the so-called “cinema of transgression” reared its head, Director Dušan Makavejev, who had been exiled from Yugoslavia for directing WR: Mysteries of the Organism, set the standard in this area with his Sweet Movie. There is something to repulse and disturb all but the most jaded sensibilities in this cinematic mind bomb: urination, emetophiliac vomiting, seduction of the innocent, murder, female masturbation in a vat of chocolate (cry, “Fire!”), communal idiocy, footage of the aftermath of the Soviet Katyn Massacre of 21,000+ Polish citizens in 1940, and a boat laden with sugar boasting the head of Karl Marx on its prow. Critics were outraged. Carole Laure, who plays Miss Canada in the film’s Miss Monde 1984 contest for beautiful virgins, walked off the set in disgust. Sweet Movie was subsequently banned in Canada(!) and many other countries. Many versions of the film were butchered, something addressed with its Criterion Edition release in 2007.

Sweet Movie has also been cited as a primary inspiration by David Hanson in creating the once-shocking Hallowe’en Disturbathon event hosted annually in Dallas, Texas for almost two decades. Prior to becoming a popularized fetish/ lifestyle showcase after Hanson’s departure, Disturbathon offered catharsis through ritualized transgression and disgust.

After winning the Miss Monde 1984 contest for “the most desirable, prominent, and well-preserved virgins,” a subversive send-up of beauty pageants, Miss Canada (Carole Laure) claims the prize of marriage to Mr. Kapital, the milk tycoon, played by John Vernon (Animal House’s Dean Vernon Wormer) who sanitizes her before urinating on her with his golden penis. She is next smuggled to Paris in a suitcase, where she meets El Macho (Sami Frey), a Latin pop star. They share a raw egg and get locked in intercourse. After being carted away in tandem by medics, Miss Canada falls in with an anarchist commune that practices therapeutic idiocy (similar to the “spassing” done by The Idiots in Lars Von Trier’s later film of that name), infantilism and other sloppy rites perhaps inspired by Makavejev’s fascination with Wilhelm Reich. Notably and logically, Otto Muehl of the Viennese Actionists appears in a moronic cameo here. When we next see Miss Canada, she is sploshing in chocolate for a television commercial, the culmination of the comingling of sex and capital in her life.

Next, the scene switches to the incredible candy-boat Survival, piloted through Amsterdam’s canals by the beautiful Anna Planeta (Anna Prucnal). After taking a sailor on as passenger, Planeta seduces him and then stabs him through the heart as they frolic in a bin filled with sugar. Later, she woos children on board and they meet a similar fate. We later see their tiny bodies, wrapped in plastic by the police, but they experience an unexplained resurrection and wander off from their bodies.

In his 1975 review upon the film’s New York release at the D.W. Griffith Theater, Vincent Canby sneered,”For a film so full of concern for the political and social sanity of man. "Sweet Movie" is, paradoxically, élitist. If one doesn't share Mr. Makavejev's knowldege of the history of Communism and Reichian psychology, much of it is incomprehensible.”

While many revile this film and its excesses, Makavejev is offering, among the nested horrors, a vision of transgressive, hedonistic freedom in his depiction of the communal banquet and ceremonies, albeit one that may not appeal to more than a few exotic freaks. Despite the bitching and grousing, Sweet Movie is an important film that takes many measured risks. Watching it more than three decades after its release, one can only be reminded that today’s filmic efforts suffer from more repression and censorship than was the case in the 1970s.

10 Most Disturbing Films: #1 Possession by Andrzej Zulawski

Director Andrzej Zulawski took all of the chaos, rage and confusion of his divorce and rolled it into this nasty treat. Though some insist that this incredibly intense drama doesn't qualify as a horror movie, the film's most notable sequences (of which there are many) all partake of the horrific, one way or another. That this has consigned a brilliant drama to a genre ghetto is regrettable but not altogether unappropriate.



Isabelle Adjani, who won a Gold Palm at Cannes for her unbelievably intense performance, plays Anna, a woman who is ready to divorce her husband Mark, a traveling spy based in Cold War Berlin, played despairingly by Sam Neill. Nor is she content with her strange lover, Heinrich, who is spastically eccentric and into occult sexual energy theories. It seems that the men in her life are driving her mad. But this doesn't quite explain what happens next as Anna gives birth in a subway tunnel to what turns out to be her own tentacled demon-lover.

There are many layers and possible interpretations to this film. In 1981, I saw the badly slashed 80 minute American release at the theater. I found it to be nonsensically disturbing and very hard to follow. It left me with that,"What the fuck?" feeling. Later, when I came across the Anchor Bay version that restored 30 minutes of plot, many of my questions still remained unanswered. There is much that is deliberately left open-ended and this, in many ways, increases the impact of the film, much in the same way that David Lynch's more obtuse efforts do. One is left to fill in the missing pieces with one's imagination.

With all of the horrific elements in play, it's hard to believe that the deepest impact comes from seeing a marriage disintegrate so spectacularly. This is the film's central horror, the dark, beating heart of the story. And it is a testament to the power of Zulawski's artistry and personal vision that Possession transcends the gimmickry-and-frisson that typifies horror cinema, even as it ultimately relies on that genre for marketing. The performances of Adjani and Neill are so strong and convey such excessive emotional turmoil that viewers may find it all quite exhausting. The experience is so involving and the acting so convincing that the appearance of the devilish love-squid squirming and pumping Anna in flagrante delicto almost seems like a natural development or even a lesser horror.

As if all this weren't quite enough, Adjani and Neill play their own dopplegangers, there is an open-ended espionage plot concerning a dangerous man with pink socks, and an ominous, eschatological ending coupled with unforgettable sounds. It's safe to say that there is no other film like Possession.

In "The Theater and Its Double," Antonin Artaud wrote a prescription that seems to have been filled by cinema in this case:

"I propose then a theater in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator seized by the theater as by a whirlwind of high forces. A theater which, abandoning psychology, recounts the extraordinary, stages natural conflicts, natural and subtle forces, and presents itself first of all as an exceptional power of redirection. A theater that induces trance, as the dances of Dervishes induce trance, and that addresses itself to the organism by precise instruments, by the same means as those of certain tribal music cures which we admire in records but are incapable of originating among ourselves."

Because of its undeniable impact, bizarre vision, and depth that merits repeat viewings, Possession seizes the top spot on this list of Most Disturbing Films with its amorous tentacles.

Hollywood's Hellfire Club

Hollywood’s Hellfire Club- The Misadventures of John Barrymore, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn and “The Bundy Drive Boys”

By Gregory William Mank with Charles Heard and Bill Nelson

When I was a teenager, my best friend was cinephile who idolized the late Errol Flynn and W.C. Fields for their antic self-destruction. Taking his passion to extremes, my friend sociopathically immitated his heroes, drunkenly tearing up hotel rooms, treating women with abusive contempt, indulging in public tantrums, chronically lying his way in and out of bad situations and pranking anyone who crossed his path. I was a well-read, simmering young man, very cynical, late-blooming and only recently hatching out of a shell of chronic shyness. Wherever my friend went, there was sure to be excitement and this was something I sorely craved. So I studied his sociopathology and incorporated much of it into my teenaged skill-set. It was during this time that I read two books by Errol Flynn, My Wicked Wicked Ways and Beam Ends. I carefully considered Flynn's higher level of mayhem and soon came to the sound conclusion that indulgences like his were symptomatic of the dissolution and disgust that often accompanies fame, wealth and power. With this epiphany came the recognition that my friend was a son of wealth and power, if not fame, whose position insured that he was never really punished for the many transgressions he committed. I had no such safety net and, a few days after my 18th birthday, was jugged for "criminal mischief" committed by my friend. I spent the night in jail and was retrieved by my folks who brokered an agreement for us to repay damages. My friend brokered an agreement with my parents that they wouldn't tell his parents, a testament to his sociopathic abilities considering how angry my mother and father were. In the long run, my friend alienated almost everyone he knew and, when he ran out of rubes, he betrayed me and I ended the friendship sadder but a lot wiser. The last I heard of my erstwhile friend, he was burning out fast, in the grip of hard substance abuse problems, possessed of few friends, and suffering from paranoia. There is a pattern here that today's book considers at some length among my friend's ideological mentors.

Hollywood's Hellfire Club, despite the abundance of incredibly humorous anecdotes, is a very dark read, particularly toward the end. It is a rogue's gallery of conflicted artists, including the half-Japanese, half-German performance artist Sadakichi Hartmann,the wickedly satirical artist and forger John Decker, and writer Ben Hecht, collectively known with their cronies as the Bundy Drive Boys. There is an abundance of scandal in these pages: alleged rape, incest, violence, sexual hijinx, art forgery, statutory rape allegations against Flynn from a necrophile, and melodrama on the high seas. This meticulously researched book is a glimpse of Hollywood Bohemianism that, as the writers suggest, eclipses most wildness committed in the free-love 1960s. Many of these celebrities, afflicted with childhood father problems, relentlessly sought the kind of self-destruction that only wealth and booze can confer. And in the end, they alienated those who loved them and most of them died relatively early.

If you are looking for a read that will make you laugh until you shudder, this is it. As the story closes, the darkness gathers around pathetic alcoholics, actors who can no longer act, human liabilities and self-involved stars. While I have read no book that so excellently showcases the hedonistic depravity of Golden Age Hollywood, the writers are to be commended for not avoiding the consequences of such desperate living. Despite this, there is a closeness and cameraderie here that is quite genuine, a league of misanthropists who took solace from each other's company. There may very well have been a few errant hearts of gold in this tortured boy's club, as quite a few touching moments suggest. And much of the mischief recounted was afflicted on some very deserving targets.

In the wake of trash icons like Britney and Paris, the older school of celebrity dissolution and insanity seems positively dignified. There is so much to admire and even love about these men that their inevitable downfalls seem so much more tragic. And like them, Hollywood's Hellfire Club walks a fine line between inspired decadence and the darker corners of human anguish.

It is a journey well worth taking.

Anglicans on Mysterians

From The Christian Challenge: The Only Worldwide Voice of Traditional Anglicanism, Volume XLII, No. 3/ May-June, 2003

BUBBLING BELIEF: And here we thought we had just about heard it all.

It was a few months ago that we reported on a San Francisc group's ideas about "sacramental" drug use at an Episcopalian parish. Now we hear of a Dallas-area group known to treat nitrous oxide (laughing gas) as a sacrament- and to throw Jacuzzi parties. Welcome to the "Hot Tub Mystery Religion."

"It's adherents hold to no particular spiritual dogma, borrowing freely from such sources as Jewish mysticism, Roman paganism, Islamic heresy and experimental art," reports www.reason.com. "One of its founders has compiled a reading list for the faithful; it includes a collection of Tantric exercises, a text on Sufism, one of Philip K. Dick's Gnostic science fiction stories, and a novel by Catholic apologist G.K. Chesterton."

Perhaps it is just the kind of "hot water" that Frank Griswold- ECUSA's presiding bishop of "pluriform" truth, who not long ago quoted a Sufi poet- wouldn't mind getting into.

Then again, the hot tub faithful are said to number well under 100 practitioners- not exactly a socially influential force. That would never do for the boy from Bryn Mawr.

The story, by the way, notes that the Jacuzzi group, while part of a wider syncretic trend, is unusual because it is so radical. "Most people do not feel the need to be the authors of their own religions," said reason,"though quite a few are happy to be the editors." Yeah, we've noticed that.

***End of Article***

What is particularly interesting about this little barb is the pretense that there is anything unusual in the idea that drugs, particularly certain plants and fungi referred to as entheogenic, can be sacramental. Indeed, many scholars suggest that the kykeon elixir of the mysteries was a psychedelic blend.

As for nitrous oxide, William James ,the father of modern psychology, wrote of his laughing gas experience in terms that echo the mystical experience of coincidentia oppositorum ,"It is impossible to convey an idea of the torrential character of the identification of opposites as it streams through the mind in this experience. I have sheet after sheet of phrases dictated or written during the intoxixation, which to the sober reader seem meaningless drivel, but which at the moment of transcribing were fused in the fire of infinite rationality. God and devil, good and evil, life and death, I and thous, sober and drunk, matter and form, black and white, quantity and quality, shiver of ecstasy and shudder of horror, vomiting and swallowing, inspiration and expiration, fate and reason, great and small, extent and intent, joke and earnest, tragic and comic, and fifty other contrasts figure in these pages in the same monotonous way. The mind saw how each term belonged to its contrast through a knife-edge moment of transition which it effected, and which, perennial and eternal, was the nunc stans of life. The thought of mutual implication of the parts in the bare form of a judgement of opposition, as "nothing--but," "no more--than," "only--if," etc., produced a perfect delirium of the theoretic rapture."

The Christian Challenge's witty religio-cultural denigration seems to be part of the largely unquestioned war against indigenous folkways perpetuated by the Roman Christian Church and its Protestant variants. One need only consider the fate of indigenous peoples and their entheogenic traditions at the hands of this tradition's staunch defenders to see one culmination of such marginalization. Stick with bread, folks, and let us tell you what God meant.

Lluvia Acida visits Tlön

Inspired by the novel "La Segunda Enciclopedia de Tlön" by Sergio Meier, from the Lluvia Acida CD Audioficciones.

¡TLÖNISTA!

“Who are the inventors of Tlön? The plural is inevitable, because the hypothesis of a lone inventor-has been unanimously discounted. It is conjectured that this brave new world is the work of a secret society of astronomers, biologists, engineers, metaphysicians, poets, chemists, algebraists, moralists, painters, geometers . . .”

-Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

Our world has long been mythologized by some as a metaphysical Prison, a Gnostic nightmare in which human beings have been incarcerated as slaves or indentured servants with assigned numbers. Such a claustrophobic, seemingly paranoiac premise inspired some of the most talented artists of the 20th century. Franz Kafka masterfully depicted the nightmarish aspects of this phantom penal system in several works, while Joseph Heller (in Catch-22) and Thomas Pynchon (in Gravity’s Rainbow) studied its paradoxical bureaucracies, secret societies and metaphysics. With the advent of Situationism, artist Guy Debord charted the shift from Prison to “Spectacle.” The Spectacle is seemingly more mall than prison, a world in which every desire must be channeled into thoughtless consumer impulses while hypnotic media imperatives ooze out of every conceivable outlet. For his brilliant television-defying epic The Prisoner, Auteur Patrick McGoohan brilliantly satirized this aspect of modern life when he created an allegorical though recognizable Prison called “The Village.” And speculative fiction writer Philip K. Dick spent years unraveling his own Gnostic epiphany of a Roman Empire which continues to dominate human beings everywhere (“The Black Iron Prison”) and its divine antithesis that will one day penetrate reality and undo this menace (the “Vast Active Living Intelligence System”).

In the last century of the second millenium C.E., the implications of this Prison myth mutated with the advent of certain technological developments: television (originally presented as the “iconoscope”), electronic surveillance, telecommunication, and ubiquitous computerization. While it must be noted that technological progress presents us with tools which are intrinsically neither good nor evil, to even question the wholesale acceptance of technological trends in some quarters is to risk being branded a reactionary or Luddite. In our rush toward an ill-defined Technotopia, only “heretics” question what impact these advances will have on our cultural and physical environment as well as on our brains. As Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, grandfather of televangelism, stated bluntly, “Radio is like the Old Testament, inasmuch as it is hearing without seeing. Television is the New Testament, for in it the Word is made flesh and dwells in our living rooms.”(1)

At its core, the Gnostic Prison myth is a tale of social control by a self-appointed elite class, depicted as either earthly or cosmic, bureaucrat or archon. Fortunately, this snug-fitting myth is often coupled with another idea: that escape from this prison is possible and that there are secret histories to guide us. More than this, it may be possible to liberate and reshape this world.

In the first part of John Crowley’s Aegypt cycle of novels, a book-within-the-book tells us, “But history is made by man. Old Vico said that man can only fully understand what he has made, the corollary to that is, that what man has made he can understand: it will not, like the physical world, remain impervious to his desire to understand. So if we look at history and find in it huge stories, plots identical to the plots of myth and legend, populated by actual persons who however bear the symbols and even the names of gods and demons, we need be no more alarmed and suspicious than we would be on picking up a hammer and finding its grip fit for our hand, and its head balanced for our striking…The story remains; and if it changes, and it does, it is because our human nature is not fixed; there is more than one history of the world. But when we believe that we have proved that there is no story, that history is just one damned thing after another that can only be because we have ceased to recognize ourselves.”(2)

There can be as many secret histories as there are thinking people. In fashioning such histories for ourselves, from hidden and neglected sources, we not only discover more about our world but also learn much about the worlds within us. The novels written from such explorations are a unique, deeply personal type of meta-fiction, charting not only neglected paths into the past but also exploratory attempts showing possible futures and strategies for achieving them: The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton; The Aegypt Cycle of John Crowley; Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed; Illuminatus! by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson; Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco; The Jerusalem Quartet by Edward Whittemore; and even the hidden history gumbo of Grant Morrison’s graphic epic, The Invisibles.

But it was Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges who broke radically new ground with his meta-fictional story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” This curious story meticulously details the not-so-subtle invasion of our world by the culture and philosophies of another hidden (or perhaps spurious) realm. The beachhead of this invasion is a single entry from a possibly apocryphal encyclopedia said to be written in English, funded and directed by an eccentric American millionaire named Ezra Buckley. Elsewhere in the story, the mad scheme is traced to alleged Rosicrucian philosopher John Valentine Andrae. In its entirety, the encyclopedia supposedly fills forty octavo volumes bound in Yellow Corinthian leather and embossed with the legend “ORBIS TERTIUS.”

In this story, Borges not only toys with the role of fiction, he uses it as a vehicle for the subversion of mundane consensus reality. The shifting depths of the story require creative, interactive hermeneutics even as they subject the reader to Tlönist memes. The idea of indoctrination by exposure to a text can be viewed as a mere literary fantasy, of course. But one may also consider it as an astute anticipation of the discovery (creation?) of memes and a brief manual for metaprogramming reality.

According to Borges: “The metaphysicians of Tlön do not seek for the truth or even for verisimilitude, but rather for the astounding. They judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature.”

Here is a revolutionary praxis for the aspiring Tlönista movement: the penetration/ reconstruction of our world from an Imaginal(3) source, in the sense that Henry Corbin coined the term.

If an invasion from the Imaginal realm seems unlikely, consider that Orson Welles handily mounted a Martian invasion that wrought prankish havoc while playing with belief and symbol systems. He also deftly adapted Kafka’s The Trial. Similarly, the unknown artists of the original German Rosicrucian Brotherhood sewed fantastic oats which grew and yielded many harvests. As Napoleon mused, “The truth is not half so important as what people believe to be true.” On one level, it could be presumed that Napoleon was insulting the gullibility of the masses. But to Tlönistas his remark could be a tribute to the power of belief and imagination to change the world. Shakespeare’s magical assertion that the “world is a stage” insinuates that existence may be enhanced by those working diligently in the dark to change the scene.

If the simulated reality is indeed a Prison, then the Tlönistas are its escape artists. They are also architects of possibilities and implementers of dream stuff. Whereas the Gnostic Archons seek to impose a restricted illusion of reality on human beings, the Tlönistas are Anarchons of almost unimaginable freedom and creative fulfillment. With the claws of moles, they dig their secret tunnels. Blessed with secret wings, they soar above internment of body and spirit. Pouring through forgotten books, they re-edit the shape of history. Their dream blueprints unfurl like magic carpets in sub rosa sanctuaries. With energized craftsmanship, they will forge and implement ideas which interpenetrate the mundane world and resonate in sympathetic minds. Once unleashed, such ideas unfold subtly yet tenaciously until they take root and sprout into manifestation.

And all the protection their endeavor requires is that it is, by ordinary standards, completely preposterous and unbelievable.

¡Tlönista!

1.Quoted in PR! A Social History of Spin by Stuart Ewen, 1996, BasicBooks, NY, NY.
2.Aegypt by John Crowley, pgs. 75-76, Bantam Spectra, 1987, NY, NY.
3.“We observe immediately that we are no longer reduced to the dilemma of thought and extension, to the schema of a cosmology and a gnoseology limited to the empirical world and the world of abstract understanding. Between the two is placed an intermediate world, which our authors designate as 'alam al-mithal, the world of the Image, mundus imaginalis: a world as ontologically real as the world of the senses and the world of the intellect, a world that requires a faculty of perception belonging to it, a faculty that is a cognitive function, a noetic value, as fully real as the faculties of sensory perception or intellectual intuition." From Mundus Imaginalis: Or The Imaginary and the Imaginal by Henry Corbin, Golgonooza Press, 1976.