Metapsychosis

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The Monterey Friends of CG Jung talks with Brian George

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The Monterey Friends of CG Jung talks with Brian George

The Monterey Friends of CG Jung talks with Brian George

16 Feb 2023   7:00 pm - 9:00 pm PST
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Virtual

The Monterey Friends of CG Jung will host a virtual talk with Brian George, on his new book, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence. All are welcome to join the live event, but you have to request the Zoom link first. The event takes place from 7-9 pm Pacific time.

The recording will also be made available via their YouTube channel.

About the Monterey Friends of CG Jung:

DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY ENTHUSIASTS

We are a group of people dedicated to creating a broader and deeper appreciation of analytical psychology, created by C.G. Jung. In our times of unprecedented change, we feel the urgency of re-examining our personal and collective narratives.

We meet regularly, sharing an enthusiasm for the philosophy and practices of depth psychology. Our meetings include presentations, discussions, and other programs.

Also see the Friends of Jung’s previous talk with Untimely Books author, Geoffreyjen Edwards, discussing his science fiction novel, Plenum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zA9Q9Gud2Mo&t=2s

 

 

Brian George

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Brian George is the author of five books of poetry and two books of essays, the first of which, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is being published by Untimely Books in 2022. Other forthcoming titles include Voyage to a Nonexistent Home; Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence; To Akasha: An incantation for the End of History; and The Preexistent Race Descends. He is a graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art, an exhibited artist and former art teacher at several Boston area middle schools, a former member of the Boston Visionary Cell, and a former organizer for Evolver Boston. He was a founding member of MAAP SPACE, a multimedia performance series, as well as of the Revolving Arts Salon and the current Cedar Square Arts Salon. He often tells people first discovering his work that his goal is not so much to be read as to be reread, and then lived with.

Author of

Monsieur Flaubert Is Not a Writer

By | Features Essays art, counter-culture, criticism, culture, diy, humor, literature, writing

With his first book recently published, essayist, poet, and artist Brian George reflects on the bizarre and often humorous ways that great works of the past were received by their contemporary critics, and how changes in the cultural landscape over the last few centuries—but especially since his coming of age in the Boston poetry and punk scenes of the late 1970s—have profoundly altered the ways we read, receive, and understand new works.

Ars Poetica

By | Microdoses Poetry CIA, conspiracy, surreal, technology, weird

There is no rest for the search engine. The unquiet dead play games with the subject/ object interface. It appears that our operating system is not a friend to Jesus. Logos flash through the sky of the Sinkiang Autonomous Region. Our wet dreams run through fiberoptic cables.

The Music of the Spheres, Again Audible

By | Features Story 1st-person, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), cosmic, egypt, insects, metaphysical, paranormal, weird

There are moments when the world comes suddenly to a stop, when the ground withdraws its support, when a schism opens, into which one may or may not fall. The world then employs its archaic sleight-of-hand to remove whatever faith you may have placed in this event. The structure of projection has barely missed a beat, but the schism in your psyche has not actually been sealed…

The Goddess as Active Listener (Part 4)

By | Features Essays, Story Mythos

“It is said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Luckily, the teacher may also choose to appear when the student is not at all ready. She drags him, if need be kicking and screaming, into a new, more direct, but also more paradoxical relationship with the self…”

Autumnal Fallout

By | Features Audio, Essays, Story Society (Multitudes), culture, tech

“It would be hard to communicate to someone growing up today just how widespread was the fallout from the threat of the Atomic Bomb. From July 16th, 1945, when the first bomb was tested over the Jornada del Muerto Desert, its occult light had continued to throw shadows from each object. The danger was not abstract; it was imminent, and it changed our whole way of looking at the world.”

Artist Interview with Deniz Ozan-George

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Artist Interview with Deniz Ozan-George

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Features Audio, Interviews, Visual Art abstract, experimental, gallery
"In the Garden 3," 2021, Encaustic, 16 x 16 in.

The text below is a summary of my discussion with Deniz Ozan-George, an artist based in Boston, Massachussetts. You can hear the full interview (including the background noises of Deniz working on a painting as we spoke together) here:

Listeners in the Boston area, who are interested in Deniz’s show should visit the gallery website. The exhibition starts at the beginning of September 2021.

While Deniz’s first solo exhibition is coming up in September 2021, she tells me that she has worked seriously as a painter since 2008, but at first she only shared her work with close friends, or the small art salons that she and her husband used to host in their home. When a friend attending their salon urged her to get involved in a cooperative gallery in Boston, she felt trepidation about exposing her art to the wider world. But Deniz hit it off with the director and gallery founder Marjorie Kaye (read an interview about Marjorie’s own painting here), discovering a connection through their experiences in Boston’s alternative music scene in the 70s and 80s.

Though she’s recently completed one portrait, Deniz considers herself first and foremost an abstract painter, lyrical, and expressionist. Ever since she started painting, Deniz tells me, she has needed to let go in the act of painting, as if she is channelling something unknowable, a vehicle for something working through her. The process is not mindless, but intuitive. For this reason, her paintings’ subjects may not be “recognizable” per se, though they evoke such adjectives as organic, geologic, microscopic, or macroscopic. “As I see them, I recognize them,” Deniz tells me. “I might choose a basic colour palette, and then from there, something will happen. It’s about accidents, and taking risks.”

I ask Deniz to tell me a little more about the role of scale in her paintings. When she was younger, Deniz really wanted to be a physicist, but felt she lacked the aptitude for math. Still, she kept an interest in subjects like popular physics, quantum mechanics, relativity, and astronomy.

“Every single thing I do is an experiment.” Sometimes the results will please her, but in the majority of cases, she ends up painting over her work with something new. Most of her canvases actually have somewhere between five and twenty different paintings buried under the more recent layers. But for Deniz, she loves the process even more than finishing something—the freedom to play.

When she was planning her show, Deniz was initially puzzled by the question of what to include. Having worked for a long time in acrylics, she had a large body of work to draw on. But recently, she’d begun to feel uninspired about her acrylics work. She found herself herself looking around her studio in search of inspiration, and fell upon a technique that she had played with years ago, and only recently taken up again in a serious way: painting with wax. The encaustic technique uses hot wax, while a related technique uses oil and cold wax; and these two techniques can also be combined.

In encaustics, the beeswax is combined with damar varnish (commonly used in oil paintings), which gives the soft wax more strength and stiffness. You can also mix the wax with pigments. Once the wax is applied to the canvas, the artist uses a small blowtorch to “fuse” it. However, if you apply too much heat, the wax will become fluid and move around the canvas. Another technique involves applying shellac, sometimes with a metal powder like gold or copper, and then burning it to produce an striking texture. The role of chance, and its innate imperfections, makes encaustics a perfect technique for Deniz, especially when she realized that she could, in effect, paint with the torch by using it to move the wax around the canvas.

Once Deniz realized that her new show was going to consist entirely of her encaustics work, she finally felt that she could see it clearly. She went back and forth between two titles for the show, “Playing with Fire” and “Painting with Fire,” but it was her husband who told her, “ʻPlaying with Fire’ is perfect because that’s what you do.”

“It’s true!” Deniz says, “For me, my work is play.”

One of the aspects that unifies all of Deniz’s paintings is a sense of depth, of looking down through multiple layers. This was hard to achieve with acrylics, since laying one transparent layer over another tends to make it rather dark, but encaustic technique is great at achieving this effect—although judicious care is still required. Deniz shows me the “mud” or wax mass that gets scraped off, either because she needs to start over, or simply because it has flowed off the edge of the canvas. Clear wax medium, without pigment, clarifies over time and will reveal more and more of the layers underneath.

The single portrait Deniz has done in recent time stands out amid her abstract works. For Deniz, this representational work was a way to refresh her creative forces, to cleanse the palate. At the beginning of December, she had just retired from a job she’d had for twenty-three years, at the same time that her mother passed away rather suddenly. It seemed like a good moment to explore a family connection. Deniz undertook a portrait based on a photo of her grandmother at age sixteen in Istanbul, Turkey. “I had a lot of questions,” Deniz says. “I had a complicated family. So I decided that one of the ways I could get to know somebody very well was by doing a portrait.”

“Afife at 16, 2021”, Egg Tempera, 12 x 9 in.

In the painting, her grandmother’s gaze is intense, almost critical. The background, reminiscent of Deniz’s other abstract works such as her series of Mosaic paintings, was painted using egg tempera, with foil added afterward. Deniz had been old enough to know her grandmother when she died in 1973, and yet she describes feeling connected to her while she painted, as if she were talking with her. “I think this is a way you can really only connect with a person when you’re painting their portrait,” she says.

Her grandmother’s portrait wasn’t the only project that she had on the go. Though Deniz’s workspace isn’t large, she has a few different work stations, allowing her to switch back and forth. While the pandemic has been a difficult time for many artists, she has found it to be a time of creative flourishing. She finds nourishment in her remote, part-time job, the companionship of her husband, Brian George, who is himself a writer and artist (read some of Brian’s writing here), and in social activities with the gallery which have been conducting over Zoom, but will hopefully return to in-person meetings. “I hope we are putting this behind us soon,” Deniz says of the pandemic, “And I hope we’ve used this opportunity to learn something.”

Having a job separate from her artistic work is important to Deniz. “If I ever became dependent on selling work,” she says, “That would mean I would be dependent on making a certain kind of work, pleasing other people instead of myself. In that case, I think I would have to stop.” Fortunately for us all, Deniz shows no signs of stopping, and we may hope to see work from her for a long time to come.

Exhibition description from Deniz Ozan-George:

As I emerged from the pandemic winter of 2021, I was overwhelmed by a desire for warmth and the sight of lush growing things. With a renewed sense of excitement and momentum, I began this series of encaustic paintings using the open flame of a torch. Fusing and moving the melted wax on the panel, and setting fire to the wet shellac, I followed the will of the wax as it created layers of filigree and color within the depths of each painting.  What finally emerged were these abstracted reflections of sky, water, and tangles of blossoms.

Playing with Fire refers to the vital role of “play” in my creative process. Following my intuition is sacred, rules are to be broken, and reckless experiment often leads to a sense of unexpected delight –  yet the risk inherent in applying an open flame to a wax painting is always present. Playing with fire involves danger; I’m working on the knife’s edge between control and chaos. Seeking the true essence of the medium and the image that arises from this alchemical process is nothing less than exhilarating.

Monsieur Flaubert Is Not a Writer

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Monsieur Flaubert Is Not a Writer

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Editor:
Features Essays art, counter-culture, criticism, culture, diy, humor, literature, writing
William Baziotes, Dwarf, 1947

With the publication of Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, my first book of essays, I am tempted to say I feel like a proud parent who sends a child off to college. The book is done, with all the sleepless nights it brought, with all the twists and turns of its unfolding, with all its absurd demands. “Spread your wings, my dear one, fly, fly!” And so it does, with barely a backward glance. Its life is now its own. This is only true alchemically, however. No sooner have I taken the book from the fumes of my athanor, than I must start to worry about its fate in the larger world. After years of careful tending, why does this book not choose to acknowledge I am here? To listen to it, you would think it had been written by another. “What is your book about?” an Uber driver might ask. Some occult anxiety then takes hold of my tongue. “Yes, my book,” I think, “you are right to be concerned. Some phrase unworthy of your dignity might pop out of my mouth.”

I do sometimes wonder what fraction of my creative process, with all its minute adjustments, will be visible to any potential reader or critic. I want to do more than to narrate or convey information or analyze or prove a thesis or describe. I fear my strategies for transferring some amount of primal energy may strike the average reader as absurd. I often ask myself, “In this age of Twitter and TikTok and Facebook, how many people actually read, with book in hand, rather than scanning for information? Who still pauses to read certain passages out loud, probing deeper and then deeper into the cross-weave of the moment, and how open are they to work that challenges their habits, and how many would see my invitation to a voyage as a threat?” Then I say to myself, “Who needs such easily disturbed readers? Why should I care if they even know the book exists?”

Then I say to myself, “Stop asking so many questions!” At a time when I am trying to push beyond my natural reserve to put my work into the world, it seems counterproductive to obsess about its future popularity, or more likely lack thereof. I have no desire to be a “brand.” I then finally say to myself, “To be preoccupied with such things only serves to justify your reluctance to take risks, your desire to stay in your comfort zone.” No, I should apologize for questioning the adventurousness of my readers—readers whom I have not even met. I am not one to judge.

To create a truly original work—rather than one the writer would like to describe as such—the writer must withdraw some portion of their energies from the world. They must then pour and seal these swirling energies into a container, into an external vessel related to but quite separate from the writer—a still half-remembered dream, a cry for help, a homunculus, a book. This vessel contains the nothing from which something may be pulled, just as the writer is a something that must plunge to unknown depths. Once the writer, the blind magician, calls them, these energies will then, if all goes well, cohere into a seed, which will then, if all goes well, begin to grow. A seed needs some protection, as well as some amount of darkness, a few weeks or nine months or even a number of decades. The whole of the future body is contained within its seed. Whether this seed ever fully expands, however, might depend on external factors. The time may or may not be right. Whatever the writer’s force of will, the fix may be in; the stars may frown upon their efforts.

For those living in comfortable alignment with their culture, this seed may open almost immediately. The disadvantage is that fashionable work—or work that is edgy or radical in a fashionable way—can just as quickly become unfashionable with the passing of that cultural moment. I had an anthology called something like “Best American Poets of the 19th Century” that my grandmother bought when she was a young teacher in the 1920s. It was a beautifully produced book with a red leather cover published around 1890. I can’t seem to locate the book just now, but it contained such luminaries as Thomas Coffin Amory, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Clarissa Minnie Thompson Allen, Thomas Gold Appleton, Mary Louisa Chitwood, James De Ruyter Blackwell, Augustine Joseph Hickey Duvanne, and Oringe Smith Crary. No poems by Emily Dickenson were included. Dickenson’s poems were resting happily in their seed. Conditions for the seed’s opening would only converge many decades later. The first complete edition of her poems was published in 1954.

William Baziotes, Night Landscape, 1947

So much of what we take to be our understanding of a writer and their work has to do with the surrounding context. Very often, our capacity to even see or hear or experience a work is in direct proportion to its familiarity. Similarly, the value that we place upon it has to do with its acceptance and praise by established authorities. We want to be assured that we are not wasting our time and effort, that the untested writer’s wanderings will somehow cohere in the end, and—most importantly, perhaps—that they are not playing some elaborate practical joke, that they are not treating us like fools. I remember my excitement at studying Eliot’s “The Wasteland” in Mrs. Goldman’s junior English class in high school. At least half the class were skeptical at first, but, assured of the poem’s status as a Modernist Masterpiece, we plunged in and were able, more or less, to follow where Eliot led. If this had been an experimental piece by a contemporary Worcester writer, I doubt that anyone would have bothered. Even with pieces that are seen as central to the culture of their period, this centrality is often an act of retrospective conjuration.

As challenging as “The Wasteland” might have been, my class saw it as approachable, and they had some sense of how the risks that Eliot took were tied up with the ultimate value of the poem. F.R. Leavis, writing in the 1920s, was not at all convinced. He writes, “In all periods creative artists have been apt to think they could think, though in all periods they have been frequently harebrained and sometimes mad; just as great rulers and warriors have cared only to be flattered for the way they fiddled or their flatulent tragedies.” He also writes, “to attempt here an interpretation, even an intelligible summary of the poem, is to risk making oneself ridiculous.” And “The borrowed jewels he has set in its head do not make Mr. Eliot’s toad more prepossessing.” And “A poem that has to be explained with notes is not unlike a picture with ‘this is a dog’ inscribed beneath.”

It is no accident that writers and painters tend to become famous in groups, and that the members of these groups, even those who do not necessarily like each other, tend to promote each other’s work. Surrealist painters and poets, Abstract Expressionist painters, Beat poets and novelists, New York School poets, and the various people associated with Warhol all became more famous collectively than they probably would have individually as a result of the group mystique. In the first three decades of the 20th Century, when Ezra Pound was well positioned socially, he was an energetic advocate for T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, H.D., Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, James Joyce, and Ford Maddox Ford. While all of these writers would no doubt have made it on their own, it might not have happened so quickly without Pound’s talent for promotion. It seems like more than a coincidence that the following writers all knew each other at Harvard: Donald Hall, Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, W.S. Merwin, Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George, Plympton, John Hawkes, Robert Creeley, and Richard Wilber. In spite of their stylistic differences, they formed a decades-long mutual promotion network.

It is significant, I think, that in their early stages, such networks depended on the writers being physically present in one place. As valuable as online exchanges can be, they do not tend to generate this lifelong sense of connection. A laptop screen is not a good substitute for a table at Le Deux Magots. An exchange of snark is less memorable than a brawl in a dark alley. Zoom is less of an intoxicant than scotch. The scent of a Word review pane does not lead up a damp and winding staircase to a bed. Writers with shared interests can certainly meet and communicate online, but I don’t know that anything similar to a 20th-century literary/artistic movement has been generated in this way. Then again, most of the writers I knew during the 1970s and 1980s have drifted out of contact, and aside from Boston bands that achieved national recognition, there are no more than fossil traces of the scene that existed when I moved here.

When I arrived in Boston to go to art school in 1974, I felt that I had wandered into a late-countercultural/surreal/avant-garde explosion. Finding writers and artists and musicians on a similar wavelength had the effect of liberating enormous stores of trapped energy. Where I was awkward, others flowed. Where others had grown too attached to certain models, I could offer to subvert them. One night, at a poetry workshop at the Widener Library at Harvard, I bumped into two poets, Jack Kimball and Don Quatrale, who invited me to a gathering of writers the following night. At 6:00 PM, the time I had been told, I arrived at 23 Joy Street. (This was back when you didn’t have to be a millionaire to live in a rundown third-floor apartment on Beacon Hill.) I knocked on the door, it opened, and a cloud of incense smoke poured out. Will Bennet, wearing a bath towel and eating a hotdog, explained that he was actually a macrobiotic vegetarian. Then, at 8:30 or so, other poets started to slowly trickle in.

The group read, contributed lines to spontaneous poems, made “exquisite corpse” drawings, and discussed Lamantia and Lautreamont and their other favorite writers. I mostly watched. The few words I said were met with some degree of suspicion. Paranoia crouched in the corners. No knock on the door was innocent. I had recently cut my hair quite short, at a time when others in such circles still wore it long, and I was viewed as being a possible DEA agent, or at best, an MIT nerd. Finally, around 2:30 AM, I was able to take advantage of a quiet moment to read a few of my poems. My reading style was eccentric, a bit like Tibetan chanting. It had evolved during two years of post-high school near solitude in Worcester, and it did not resemble any of the current styles of performing poetry. It had been known to scare people. I read one piece without incident, but a minute or so into the second piece, something unexpected happened. Many group members started to laugh, hysterically, as they rolled around on the floor. They slapped the arms of their chairs, shrieking. They hooted and barked. They threw pillows around the room. Did this mean they didn’t like the work? As it turned out, quite the opposite was true. They expressed their delight at my having taken them so thoroughly by surprise. Many in this group would remain my catalysts and critics for at least the next ten years.

A bit later, the late-countercultural scene moved into early punk. Already dark, the energy of the local arts scene darkened once again, but in a way that proved invigorating, in a way that transformed political despair into an alternate form of light, in a way that opened up possibilities for new collaborations. The best part was: Things happened by themselves. Or, to phrase this in a slightly different way, writers, artists, musicians, and various other performers put great stock in the D.I.Y.—Do It Yourself—attitude. Start small, ignore detractors, play around, and trust that things will somehow come together.

In Shakespeare in Love, the plans of the young Shakespeare and his friends are always just about to collapse. In one scene, all of London’s theaters have been shut down by the plague, and the Rose’s owner, Philip Henslowe, is about to be tortured by moneylenders. He says, “Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.” Fennyman then asks, “So what do we do?” Henslowe answers, “Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.” Fennyman asks, “How?” Henslowe answers, “I don’t know. It’s a mystery.” The town crier then announces, “The theatres are reopened, by order of the Master of Revels!”

Jean-Michel Basquiat, In Italian, 1983

This sense of almost effortless expansion, of a magical equilibrium between self and environment—delusional though it might be—continued through the five years of my involvement with MAAPS—Metropolitan Artists and Poets—a monthly series of performance events and art exhibits and spontaneous book assemblies that was launched in 1979 and ran until 1984. These events attracted around 200 or more attendees and participants, and since we charged $5 for admission, they more than paid for themselves. Then, around 1982, the whole climate of the city began to change, at first subtly and then dramatically. Reagan cast his spell. It was “Morning in America.” Evangelicals fell in love with politics. The Contras tortured thousands, thus insuring that Nicaragua would never invade Texas. Yuppies became stock brokers. Graffiti artists became prime targets for investment, and avant-gardists began to define themselves in terms of competing “brands.” At artists’ cold water lofts the rents went up, and then up again, and then continued to go up. One by one, the jazz and punk clubs closed. MAAPS lasted a bit longer, but the moment of alignment had passed. Whatever the external changes, however, this moment vibrates in my memory. I still believe in D.I.Y. 

There are days I physically ache for that state of disjunctive harmony, when my peers and I were much younger than we knew. World weary, and glad of it, we could dance free of the snares of repressive desublimation. We could resurrect Artaud. We could reinvent the night. What fun to be an exile at play with other exiles, entranced by the oracular power of synchronicity, almost content to be poor. Now I am able to speak to friends on the other side of the globe, friends I would not have met in some other period. I can do interviews about my book on YouTube, and I can check the number of views it gets, but I cannot conjure the culture into which my book will fit. “These Cloud-based communities are as vaporous as clouds!” I think, “unlike my youthful memories.”

I should perhaps be less quick to talk like someone in his 60s, like someone who has no more interest in technology now than he did 40 years ago. Dear reader, if you have made it this far in my essay, I may have spoken much too soon. As I have said, I am not one to judge. My flights of vision have informed me that we misconceive the body, which parts are here and which are over there, which parts are now, which parts are then, and which will one day be. Just as no fixed line divides one psyche from another, no line divides our bodies from the outer edge of space. What we see as distance may be no more than pure habit. As I know from my reading of Rimbaud at the age of 17, the dead can have power over us, sometimes more so than the living. We do not live in one time, one culture, or one place. As much as I miss certain clubs and bookstores and artists’ lofts and cafes, I have no desire to play the victim of nostalgia, except of a cosmic sort. As you read these words, who knows, my book, Masks of Origin, may be making a new friend. Let me give thanks to the hands of every stranger who will hold it.

⧜

James Ensor, The Frightful Musicians, 1891

The understanding we feel in reading or seeing or listening to beloved works is often due, as I have said, to an act of alternate history, a retrospective sleight-of-hand. Those first encountering the works in question were much less likely to see them as “Masterworks” or “Classics,” and they would have been shocked to learn that they would later be seen as being central to the culture. Over the past few weeks, I’ve made a small research project of collecting contemporaneous comments on works and creators who were only later fit into the context though which we now understand them. Here are a few:

A critic for the Allemeine Musikalische Zeitung writes of his disorientation on hearing Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge that it is “incomprehensible, like Chinese,” “a confusion of Babel,” and that the concert as a whole was one that “only the Moroccans might enjoy.”

On Beethoven’s 9th Symphony:

“The fourth movement is, in my opinion, so monstrous and tasteless and, in its grasp of Schiller’s ‘Ode,’ so trivial that I cannot understand how a genius like Beethoven could have written it. I find in it another proof of what I had already noted in Vienna, that Beethoven was wanting in aesthetic feeling and in a sense of the beautiful.”—composer Louis Spohr

“We find Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony to be precisely one hour and five minutes long; a fearful period indeed, which puts the muscles and lungs of the band and the patience of the audience to a severe trial…”—The Harmonicon, London, 1825

“It opened with eight bars of a commonplace theme, very much like Yankee Doodle…The general impression it left on me is that of a concert made up of Indian war whoops and angry wildcats.”—a Providence, R.I. newspaper, 1868

“But is not worship paid this Symphony mere fetishism? Is not the famous Scherzo insufferably long-winded? The unspeakable cheapness of the chief tune, ‘Freude, Freude!”—Musical Record, Boston, 1899

A contemporary critic on Chopin: “In search of ear-rending dissonances, torturous transitions, sharp modulations, repugnant contortions of melody and rhythm, Chopin is altogether indefatigable.”

Edward Hanslik on Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto: “We see plainly the savage vulgar faces, we hear curses, we smell vodka…Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto gives us for the first time the hideous notion that there can be music that stinks to the ear.”

Boston Evening Transcript on Brahms: “It must be admitted that to the larger part of our public, Brahms is still an incomprehensible terror.”

A contemporary critic on Richard Strauss’s Salome: “Strauss has hitherto reveled in the more or less harmonious exploitation of the charnel house, the grave, and the gnawing worm… There is not a whiff of fresh and healthy air blowing through Salome except that which exhales from the cistern… The orchestra shrieked its final horror and left the listeners staring at each other with smarting eyeballs and wrecked nerves.”

James Ensor, The Despair of Pierrot, 1892

John Gibson Lockhart in Blackwood’s on “Cockney” poet John Keats: “To witness the disease of any human understanding, however feeble, is distressing, but the spectacle of an able mind reduced to a state of insanity is of course ten times more afflicting. It is with such sorrow as this that we have contemplated the case of Mr. John Keats… an unsettled pretender… an uneducated and flimsy stripling… without logic enough to analyze a single idea, or imagination enough to form one original image…. We venture to make one small prophecy, that his bookseller will not a second time venture 50 quid upon anything he can write. It is a better and a wiser thing to be a starved apothecary than a starved poet; so back to the shop Mr. John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes.”

John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review on Keats: “Unintelligible, diffuse, tiresome, and absurd.”

On Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights:

“How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors.”—Graham’s Lady’s Magazine, 1848

“Here all the faults of Jane Eyre (by Charlotte Brontë) are magnified a thousandfold, and the only consolation which we have in reflecting upon it is that it will never be generally read.”—James Lorimer, writing in the North British Review, 1847.

On Melville’s Moby Dick: “Mr. Melville is evidently trying to ascertain how far the public will consent to be imposed upon. He is gauging, at once, our gullibility and our patience. Having written one or two passable extravagancies, he has considered himself privileged to produce as many more as he pleases, increasingly exaggerated and increasingly dull…. In bombast, in caricature, in rhetorical artifice—generally as clumsy as it is ineffectual—and in low attempts at humor, each one of his volumes has been an advance among its predecessors…. Mr. Melville never writes naturally. His sentiment is forced, his wit is forced, and his enthusiasm is forced. And in his attempts to display to the utmost extent his powers of ‘fine writing,’ he has succeeded, we think, beyond his most sanguine expectations….We have no intention of quoting any passages just now from Moby-Dick. The London journals, we understand, ‘have bestowed upon the work many flattering notices,’ and we should be loth to combat such high authority. But if there are any of our readers who wish to find examples of bad rhetoric, involved syntax, stilted sentiment and incoherent English, we will take the liberty of recommending to them this precious volume of Mr. Melville’s.”—New York United States Magazine and Democratic Review, 1852

The Chicago Times on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: “The cheeks of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly, flat and dishwatery utterances.”

On Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina: “Sentimental rubbish… Show me one page that contains an idea.”—The Odessa Courier, 1877.

On Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

“Incapable of true poetical originality, Whitman had the cleverness to invent a literary trick, and the shrewdness to stick to it.”—Peter Bayne, Contemporary Review, 1875

“No, no, this kind of thing won’t do… The good folks down below (I mean posterity) will have none of it.”—James Russell Lowell, quoted in The Complete Works Vol 14, 1904

“Whitman is unacquainted with art as a hog is with mathematics.”—The London Critic

“Of course, to call it poetry, in any sense, would be mere abuse of language.”—William Allingham, letter to W.M. Rossetti, 1857

“Mr. Whitman’s attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect; because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste… Our hearts are often touched through a compromise with the artistic sense but never in direct violation of it.”—Henry James, The Nation

“Whitman, like a large shaggy dog, just unchained, souring the beaches of the world and baying at the moon.”—Robert Louis Stevenson, Familiar Studies, 1882

“His lack of a sense of poetic fitness, his failure to understand the business of a poet, is clearly astounding.”—Francis Fisher Browne, The Dial, 1882

“He was a vagabond, a reprobate, and his poems contain outbursts of erotomania so artlessly shameless that their parallel in literature would hardly be found with the author’s name attached. For his fame he has to thank just those bestially sensual pieces which first drew him to the attention of all the pruriency of America. He is morally insane, and incapable of distinguishing between good and evil, virtue and crime.”—Max Nordau, 1895

“It is no discredit to Walt Whitman that he wrote Leaves of Grass,only that he did not burn it afterwards.”—Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The Atlantic, “Literature as an Art,” 1867

On Hardy’s Tess of The D’Urbervilles: “An unpleasant novel told in a very unpleasant way.”—The Saturday Review, 1891

On Joyce’s Ulysses:

“Ulysses appears to have been written by a perverted lunatic who has made a specialty of the literature of the latrine… I have no stomach for Ulysses…James Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sniggering louts of schoolboys guffaw about. In addition to this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of a demented George Meredith. There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two-thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse salacrity [sic] intended for humour.”—The Sporting Times, 1922

“The average intelligent reader will glean little or nothing from it… save bewilderment and a sense of disgust.”—The New York Times

Virginia Woolf on Ulysses: “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me: the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.”

The New York Times on Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out: “Aside from a certain cleverness—which, being all in one key, palls on one after going through a hundred pages of it—there is little in this offering to make it stand out from the ruck of mediocre novels which make far less literary pretension. As for the story itself, it is painfully lacking, both in coherency and narrative interest.”

On the Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

“Mr. Scott Fitzgerald deserves a good shaking. Here is an unmistakable talent unashamed of making itself a motley to the view. The Great Gatsby is an absurd story, whether considered as romance, melodrama, or plain record of New York high life.”—L.P Hartley, The Saturday Review, 1925

“We are quite convinced after reading The Great Gatsby that Mr. Fitzgerald is not one of the great American writers of today.”— Ruth Snyder in New York Evening World

On Huxley’s Brave New World: “A lugubrious and heavy-handed piece of propaganda.”—Margaret Cheney Dawson, writing in theNew York Herald Tribune Book Review, 1932.

On Hemingway’s Across the River and into the Trees: “Not one syllable of what Hemingway has written can or will be missed by any literate person in the world.”—The New York Times.

“At a conservative estimate, one million dollars will be spent by American readers for this book. They will get for their money 34 pages of permanent value.”—Commonweal, 1940, on Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls

On Madame Bovary: “Monsieur Flaubert is not a writer.” — Le Figaro, 1857.

Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence – A Review

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Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence – A Review

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Signal Boost Books, Reviews essays, perception, synchronicity, visionary, youth

Editors’ note: Marjorie Kaye, an artist whom we’ve previously featured, kindly submitted the following review, which we share here in our blog. Disclosure: we are also the publisher of this book.

Brian George, Uroborus

Each chapter of Masks of Origin—a book of what perhaps can only be called “visionary” essays, by Brian George—reads like an individual novel. Divided into personal and universal experiences, each informs the other. Descriptions of events in childhood and adulthood provide a wormhole into the cosmos. The demeanor of his writing lends itself to a constant awareness of meaning. The mind is broken apart like a geode, revealing its crystalline structure, layers built atop one another, born from the ancient and all that precedes it.

The experiences that George describes are ones that are available to anyone but are rarely perceived. The author is so finely attuned, so inexplicably hyper-observant that nothing escapes his notice. In fact, everything acts as a Russian Doll in his perception: one event opening to another to another, so that each observation is a fractal and holds the seed for the next incarnation of thought. It is a world that many of us visit and aspire to reach, yet only rarely can we put into words. Everything is significant and is in a relationship with his thoughts, yet these are deliciously bereft of opinion.

In “The Music of the Spheres, Again Audible,” he thanks a glorious scarab for appearing and making the miraculous known to him. He notices a triangular shape etched on the stone of a wall where the scarab had positioned itself beneath a circular light the night before. He writes: “Through the years, I had experienced quite a number of synchronicities, events in which the inner and the outer worlds, for a moment, corresponded. The encounter with the scarab nonetheless took me by surprise. This did not seem like a ‘meaningful coincidence.’ Rather, it seemed like a sign that had been sent, and the sign itself appeared to have some degree of agency. What is the sound of one anonymous poet speaking?” The scarab was the physical embodiment of an answer. Here, the writer acknowledges the experience in a poet’s tunnel, the scarab acting as a sort of rabbit to George’s Alice. 

He again has audience with another scarab and observes subtle movement, knowing that the scarab was attempting its own method of communication. George speaks Scarabese. He also wonders whether they were “impressed,” but in his humorous manner, shrugs it off with a “one makes do.” Without self-interest getting in the way, one can see all measure of the wondrous. A leaf on the floor. Dust in the corner. All beautiful and fulfilling and amazing—and these chapters teach us to see it.

Not one to linger in the solitude of a clear mind, George ventures out to the machine of the power structure, wondering indeed where such strata get permission to evolve from idea to materialization. He exposes his young angst quite stunningly in his chapter, “Only Two Lines Could be Saved from the Mahabharata,” in which the writer relates a parallel world with a certain history teacher. George is a young student who notices the methods by which a teacher packs his pipe with tobacco, and then rejects these in one fell swoop. Remembering an action such as this is a vortex in which a story is formed, like cotton candy around a paper cone in a cotton candy machine. George beautifully relates feeling a common thread with this teacher: that both had somehow stared into the Abyss while cheating it of its absorption. Young George feels a kinship with this man and asks him to edit his epic poem, his “Teenage Mahabharata,” which he wrote in the wee hours of the morning. The teacher flips on him, probably from envy, and proves himself to be not of a similar soul at all. Reducing himself to snobbery and pettiness, intimidated by the power of the young man’s writing, he tears it to shreds. George, ever thankful, calls it “sowing the seed of divine discontent,” using his powerful personal alchemy against the follies of a lower mind.

In the author’s words, it is a sobering thought to realize, when you are a four-year-old playing with clay, that the snakes and rivers you are attempting to make pale in comparison to the real ones you had once created (from “The Long Curve of Descent”). George opens these gaps in perception. Perhaps they are already open. He will slap your face until you stop trying to dress him up as a healing shaman. There are other writers for that. This writer finds himself to be a shaman but hasn’t always time to consider it, to put any grand importance on the fact. He is not interested in the veracity of his shamanhood, but of his work, his experience. That is the beauty of Masks of Origin: it is self-referential without being about the self.

Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence is available from Untimely Books.

Image Credit: Maurits Verbiest, Message from Outer Space (CC BY 2.0)

Masks of Origin—an attempted Review

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Masks of Origin—an attempted Review

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Editor:
Features Books, Reviews Mythos, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), book-review, experimental
"Oceanic Mask" (painting by Brian George)
Brian George, Oceanic Mask, oil pastel on paper, 2003
Masks of Origin, by Brian George (Untimely Books, 2022)

I opened Brian George’s physically beautiful Masks of Origin—adorned with three-and-a-fraction of his own electric geometric red-green gargoyles, to find myself “reading,” if one might call it that, the whole book nearly straight-through that day, and the next.

My winding passage through Masks of Origin—George’s first-to-be-published of six volumes of poetry and essays—began in a room in a little beach town in what used to be Mexico, which used to be Costal Chumash territory, observed from the planet that used to be Jupiter and is now being rehabbed… and it went on like that… until at last, on page 368, I looked up, still in my room.

To get there, I had traveled more than 225 million years around the galaxy’s drain-hole, listening to Holy Names and dirty-tricks and true laments from inside the swallow-louse’s digs in the hollow shaft of a lost feather….

Well, Reader, you might guess by now, this would-be reviewer’s dilemma?

∞

Masks begins—where else?—with What is missing. “Paleolithic ghosts… have removed the stars for safe-keeping…tempting us to think that nothing of significance has been lost.”

Once and more than once upon a timeless time… near the beginning of memory, comes Loss—abrupt removal of pristine awareness, in the name of safety and reason. This moment, this morning, this eon, thanks to George’s translucent writing, comes to us “live” in color, sound, and feeling.

Almost immediately I found that re-entering this “moment” of loss from George’s changing perspectives provoked a dreamy resonance in me of expansion and contraction, insight and doubt. I turned pages and could not stop.

Re-animated spirits are driven to re-tell (and to alter) their stories. Case in point: Medusa’s terrifying visage, her snaky hair, snatched away, reveals itself to be a cover-up for Beauty so fantastic it terrifies—even more than the famous hissing Ugliness capable of turning the arrogantly curious Perseus, and his ilk, to stone. Next time you look, her head is gone. And fleeing with that furious head? Some politician-hero (wind-blown hair, bespoke uniform) carrying it off in a diplomatic pouch, to prove his loyalty to the State.

Loss, cosmic strong-force, psychic turbine, keeps Storyteller, Listener/Reader going. Its faces are legion. Loss, in young Brian’s case, comes first in the form of an utterly baffling corrective anger on the part of a more or less ordinary, well-meaning parental/cultural authority.

Later on, student, husband and father, storyteller, our Guide wings us off through vast, simultaneous, omnipresent, tragi-comic Cosmoi—what is the plural of Cosmos?! His biographical close-ups re-orient, nearly reassure us. Then crack into mythic, archaic-spiritual and tragic-historical points of view… on the page and in the spinning psyche.

Naturally, beginning in The Shadow of Loss, our journey through Masks of Origin, if we choose to brave it, proves rougher—and far more rewarding—than any carnival dark-ride.

For one thing, Masks takes place under countless exiled eyes—those still powerful, all-seeing stars. Birds of unknown origin hector George (and us) throughout. Nevermore Birds. Hitchcockean flocking Birds. John Michael Greer’s prophecy-fulfilling Birds, which even now and in spite of mounting evidence of decline and disappearance, are nevertheless on their way—in the wake of humanity’s fall—to becoming the apex species here on planet Earth. Protector-Deity Birds speak out of the undiscovered-by-science eight flute-holes in the roof of their throats.

Brian George, Snake Arising out of Pot, Bird Arising out of Snake, 1990

In Tibetan Buddhist iconography, Protector Deities are among the most terrifying of divinities. A Western interpreter/teacher of mine warns that to adopt a Protector Deity practice means inviting a sacred monster with x-ray senses to do whatever it takes to dismantle your most cherished habits of thought and action concerning your self and your world. Habit-patterns, samskaras, also known as The Puny But Lethal Ones, pretend to be our friends while leading us directly out to the field of Sand Pits. The Pits, like post-war mines, seem randomly sited, randomly activated. But a shadow-self Protector, it turns out, has offered you up, body and mind, to the Ant-Wolf who, while you aren’t paying attention, does the dirty-work of re-excavation and ongoing Pit-repair… To keep things… well, moving along.

Blake, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, declares the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Maybe so. But in Masks, the palace has a cellar with escape-tunnels leading into streets, suburbs and cities (Where are the rivers and forest?!) of illness, aging, and death. Maybe Blake was only describing one spoke-turn of the star-wheel?

“Success” even quicker than “failure” sends us spinning along the rim of the next hungry Pit, where Ant Lion’s jaws agape at the nadir of the cone. Those jaws wait. Patient. For the recurring moment in the story when the sand pit begins to rotate, we veer closer, each grain chanting unintelligible advice, and, once again, no surprise, we lose our footing.

In Masks, as the whirling Hospitalities confound, each one’s alluring course of poetry and artistry delights. Is corrected by the tonic of History, that most bitter brew of “breaking news” as old as enslavement and eviction. Round and round we go… where are we going to…?

Following the glyphs leading to the exit of the labyrinth, we begin to see a light that was hidden by the sky. Descending further, we fall into the first age there ever was, into the knowledge that our yearning has made possible. How bittersweet this moment! Our home turns out to be something we have no choice but to leave.

∞ 

Masks is Jazz. In the specific and in the larger sense. Glints and slivers, notes and rhythms divining multiple directions inside the Music, in time, yes, space yes. Through getting lost. And through reunion—Blackberry Reunion, no water too wide, no motherless child. Oh yeah. Only to find Reunion is a night-dream disappearing us out of the world again… sand swirling at our feet….

Here and now, as I write, I’m listening to a Palestinian initiation piece. Finger cymbals, hand-size tambourines. The loud strokes, plucks, caresses… in unbroken tradition through exile and punishment, I think, as I hear what sounds like a European bass cello finger-stepping up and down fretless strings…. The piece begins with a chorus of joy, ululation, and the skipping-heart of a drum. In the key of ecstasy, perhaps. We know this key exists, we have heard it! But in no time the bass slides off the trajectory my brain so confidently predicted… Off key? No. Another loop around the bend and back again….

Masks as it travels, unravels its own twists and ties, knots and unknots, breaks and restores its own promise. No-thing is hidden. Yet it’s ungraspable. Nothing is there. And everywhere.

Another Buddhist teacher of mine says, either way, gradual or sudden, this emptiness is fruitful.

Why? is only one of the Goddess’ names….

∞

Brian George, in one of my favorite of his many essays, “Itutu: Coolness as Preparation for a Meeting with the Daimon,” begins with questions, and early on concludes, “The only correct answer may be a finger to the lips.” Precisely my response at page 368 (the last) of Masks. My silenced mind accompanied my pen’s mute awkwardness, brain thrown into relentless, fragmented babble. Oh God. How can I possibly come up with anything worth saying about this… this book?!

It was a few days later that I re-read George’s brilliant essay, “Coolness,” on the roots of that (mostly Black) American origin of this peculiar musical genre. Brian writes, “…methods [jazz explorers] developed led only deeper into the night… It seemed likely that there were harmonic laws… but these laws were being constantly subverted and reshuffled.” Exactly. The rules of the game get changed on us as we play. And again, as we fall silent.

Jazz, George reminds us, reveals itself to the hounded runaway, the alienated artist in the big city. Jazz blazes temporary paths through night-worlds. Inevitably we come to a crossroad. Whispered imperatives urge us to choose between irreconcilable off-ramps in our assumed itinerary. Between “… the manifest and the subtle… the contemporary and the ancient… the illusory and the real.” (George’s lyrics, emphases mine)

Masks asks: Why not choose “all pathways at once?” Why not refuse to choose… and let the music take you?!

As in “Coolness,” Masks’ Introductor and Psychopomp, Brian George, kindly advises: Let the music (wherever whenever you find it) rearrange you—whether you be an “alienated subject of a modern industrial state or victim of… centuries of injustice”—let the music seriously rearrange you, within the resonant “web of correspondences.”

Who speaks through Her mask, answers all questions with Because.

If a stranger or a friend, out of sacred hospitality, offers you a psilocibe mushroom to chew at your leisure, would you be willing to set aside a precious day or two to savor it? A few weeks or months to digest it?

Would you, would-be reader?

I realize that recommending Masks to friends, known and unknown, might be akin to buying them a recording of John Cage’s 4 Minutes 33 Seconds. Will they still be your friends when the music ends?

Masks doesn’t actually end, though. There is and will be much more, where it came from.

And there will be those, too, George reassures us, who stay for the music as well as the silence. Those who will “see [his] attempts to speak as a kind of ritual, as a way of pointing to the arcane geometry that joins one world to another.”

Maía
October, 25, 2022
Lunar Samhain, New Moon in Scorpio

Masks of Origin: Regression in Service of Omnipotence (Untimely Books, 2022) is available from the retailers listed on the publisher’s web page.

Transmissions Archive

2023

March 7
Practical Fantasies

2022

"Oceanic Mask" (painting by Brian George)
Brian George, Oceanic Mask, oil pastel on paper, 2003

November 23
Masks of Origin—a new book from Brian George—and other visionary literature for adventurous readers

Plenum: The First Book of Deo – book cover

April 21
Announcing ‘Plenum: The First Book of Deo’ by Geoffreyjen Edwards – now published by Untimely Books

March 4
Transmissions: A Turning Point

2021

Cassini – Janus and Titan – 2006-03-21 – by Justin Cowart, CC BY 4.0

December 31
Transmissions: At the Fulcrum of the Year

“Reverse Space Time” from the Antarean Oracle by Brigid Burke

November 26
November 2021: Between the Struggle and the Dream

October 17
Transmission – October 2021

Image Credit: Magnetar Enigma Deepens (NASA, Chandra, 10/14/10) CC-BY-nc

The Music of the Spheres, Again Audible

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The Music of the Spheres, Again Audible

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Features Story 1st-person, Noetics (Mind/Spirit), cosmic, egypt, insects, metaphysical, paranormal, weird
Scarab on the Boat of Ra, from Egyptian Book of the Dead manuscript

There are moments when the world comes suddenly to a stop, when the ground withdraws its support, when a schism opens, into which one may or may not fall. The world then employs its archaic sleight-of-hand to remove whatever faith you may have placed in this event. The structure of projection has barely missed a beat, but the schism in your psyche has not actually been sealed. When I was 17, I had an experience from which I never did recover. To describe it clearly is not to communicate its impact. One night, at 2:00 AM or so, I was seized by an enormously loud ringing and droning sound. At first, I took this to be some type of bizarre emergency warning system, designed to get each person in the city out of bed, although it seemed like overkill for anything short of an imminent nuclear war. The sound could also be compared to Tibetan chanting: enormously low, bone-shaking bass notes supported a middle ground of complex musical geometries, repetitive but chameleonic and difficult to hear all at once, which then rose into almost inaudible overtones.

Upon hearing this sound, I rushed from one window to the next. The whole of space reverberated, as if the visible world were about to shake itself apart, and yet nowhere could I detect the nature of the emergency or the source of the alarm. A soft wind lifted the curtains, bringing with it the aroma of burnt ozone. As I looked out over the factories and freight-yards and the lights of the few cars moving, I could imagine the night watchmen leaning back in their chairs, pausing with their bottles of Jim Beam lifted halfway to their lips. I could imagine mothers holding their crying children to their breasts. I could imagine fathers yelling at their crying children to shut up. I could imagine the bored policemen, now suddenly alert, trying to remember what their training manuals specified. I could imagine the confusion of the airport personnel, as they struggled to find a target for their searchlights. I could imagine the National Guardsmen snapping to attention by their bunks.

In passing, I registered the odd lack of activity. No one in my family had joined me at the windows. Not a single one of my neighbors had run into the street. No lights had immediately come on, and most of the houses in the city were still dark. I saw, in the field across from my house, the milkweed pods pop open. I did not wake anyone up, and I hoped that the city would still be there when I woke up in the morning.

Brian George, The Returning of the Spheres, photogram, 2002

In the morning, when I discovered that no one else had heard a thing, I was shocked, yes, but I was less shocked than I would have expected myself to be. I had begun, even as the event was taking place, to suspect that this sound was actually the “music of the spheres.” For many thousands of years, perhaps, the volume of these spheres had been turned down way too low, or it could be that faceless functionaries had plugged our ears with wax. Then suddenly—no doubt for reasons that were long ago explained, but by temperamental teachers, and in a language we don’t speak—the music became audible. Certain things, once heard, cannot later be unheard. With my ears a bit more open than they were, I also came to understand the implications of my exile, the hard limits of my ability to communicate what I knew.

Years later, in 1992, I had just finished the first coherent version of To Akasha: An Incantation for the Crossing of an Ocean. There would be quite a number of others. This first one was significant, however. In an attempt to create a body from my spiritual explorations, I had filled notebook after notebook with circuitous scribblings. Together, they formed a pile about ten inches high. This 80-page version suggested that there may be hope for me yet.

It was 11:00 PM. I was still at work, and I had just found out that my relief would be an hour to 90 minutes late. Restless, and very eager to get home, I went out for a walk around the building. A few squeaks and some static trickled from the exosphere. With a twinge of concern, I noticed that my shadow, bit by bit, had begun to disregard the law that it should imitate my movements. It measured between four and thirty feet, and it would slip from one length to the other with dangerous rapidity. It seemed possible that my height was actually changing. In addition, I did not dare to look at my reflection in the window, for fear that it would not be there. Then suddenly, at my feet, I heard a loud clicking and banging and clattering sound, like a bunch of scissors snipping, along with pots and pans being knocked together. Looking down, I saw a luminous red-gold scarab, about two and one-half inches long. It was flapping its wings, and doing a kind of geometrical dance, and going out of its way to make sure that I would stop to pay attention.

Are there scarabs in the Boston/Cambridge area? There were certainly none of this size or color or beauty, and it seemed unlikely that a dung beetle was supposed to be emitting light. All of this was strange, but stranger still was that I had just Xeroxed the inner cover for the book, upon which was a picture from an Egyptian manuscript of a scarab riding in the Barge of the Enead—the nine Egyptian gods—with his forelegs holding up the Sun.

Luxor, Valley of the Kings, Tomb of Seti I

What else could I do? I followed where the scarab led. I followed him for about 80 feet, around the front and then around the side of the building, at which point he flew up and positioned himself about three inches down from and directly under the center of a lamp, as though, once again, he were holding up the Sun. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” I repeated in my mind, which I had become convinced that he could read. My mind was almost altogether blank, like a sky with a few clouds, through which bolts of compacted information, like lightning, would flash and then dissolve. I did not dare to move, and I stared, transfixed, until my relief arrived an hour and a half later. The scarab was still there when I left. The next day, when I arrived for work at 3:00 PM, I found that, beneath the lamp, a faint triangle had been inscribed on the cement.

Through the years, I had experienced quite a number of synchronicities, events in which the inner and the outer worlds, for a moment, corresponded. The encounter with the scarab nonetheless took me by surprise. This did not seem like a “meaningful coincidence.” Rather, it seemed like a sign that had been sent, and the sign itself appeared to have some degree of agency. What is the sound of one anonymous poet speaking? The scarab was the physical embodiment of an answer.

There was another, more recent, incident, as well. If the encounter did not grab me by the hair, as did the first, it too could not later be unseen. That the incident was not dramatic was perhaps a part of its point. In June of 2010, at midnight, I was walking by a field a few blocks from my house. I had left for work at 6:15 AM. It had been a long and entirely uneventful day. I had no energy left, and I could not wait to get home. From a distance, I observed that the night was very beautiful. I felt nothing. Clouds billowed, like the spirits of dead architects, across the moon, and I became convinced that a scarab would be waiting for me on the sidewalk. And there he was! This was a slightly smaller red-gold scarab, not quite as luminous, but, then again, I had learned to pay attention.

The fragrance of the night washed over me: cut grass, car exhaust, cedar chips mixed with dung, sumac in heat, salt air from the ocean, rosemary. The scarab, after doing a little geometric dance, then crawled toward my right foot in a perfectly straight line. He touched the center of the shoe with his head, looped sideways, walked straight between my feet, keeping to a path that was equidistant between the shoes, and then looped back to touch the center of my left heel, before veering off at a 45-degree angle into the field. I took this to mean, “Hello.” There was no grand drama, only a silent exchange of gestures, unnoticed by the world.

Ancient Egyptian wall carvings, Temple of Horus, Edfu, Egypt

Who knew that scarabs were such organized creatures? Truly, they have rolled the cities of Prehistory into a ball, which they then proceed to exhibit to the blind. They are OCD metaphysicians! Earlier, it had taken the equivalent of an air-raid siren to remind me of the inner workings of the cosmos. If the music that I heard was real, an encrustation of defenses had led me to hear it as an alarm, to perceive these primordial harmonies as a threat. The two scarabs employed a subtler mode of provocation. If I was far too big to follow them through the cracks in the lunar mirror, at least I had not stepped on one. I felt that I was making some small amount of progress.

I take no gifts from the decentralized kleptocracy. I put no faith in credentials, my own or those of others. I do my best to be aware of the actions I perform, to pour my blood into my writing, to speak out of the dark heart of the zeitgeist. I would see with eyes that are lit by a distant star. I would hear what was whispered on the Barge of the Enead. I would kiss the stone that prompts fear in the most ancient of philosophers, the stone whose energy shook apart the first home of the gods. These scarabs are the witnesses to the seriousness of my efforts. It was difficult to tell whether or not they were impressed. One makes do.

Masks of Origin: Sign-up Confirmation

Thanks for your interest in Brian George’s new novel Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence.

If you expressed an interest in reviewing the book, becoming a supporter, or getting involved with our cooperative team, we will be in touch soon.

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Transparency is the Only Shield against Disaster (Parts 1–2)

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Transparency is the Only Shield against Disaster (Parts 1–2)

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Features Essays Bible, Book of Revelation, Early Christianity, Gnostic Voices, Greek Mythology, Maya, Mythos, Nordic mythology, Society (Multitudes), apocalypse, cosmogenesis, end times, extinction, initiation, the Double, the Shadow
Eugene Berman, View in Perspective of a Perfect Sunset, 1941
Eugene Berman, View in Perspective of a Perfect Sunset, 1941

Editor’s note: This is the first of three installments. The complete essay has seven parts. See installment 2 (parts 3–5) and installment 3 (parts 6–7).

Eugene Berman, View in Perspective of a Perfect Sunset, 1941
Eugene Berman, View in Perspective of a Perfect Sunset, 1941

“And the Powers all gathered and went to the Archgenitor. They said to him, ‘Where is your boasting now? Did we not hear you say, “I am your God and I am your father and it is I who begat you and there is no other beside me?” Now behold, there has appeared a Voice belonging to that invisible Speech of the Aeon, which we know not.’”

from the Nag Hammadi text Trimorphic Protenoia

1

As I write this, we are now in the 2019th year of the era labeled “After Christ.” Certain Christian, Jewish, and Gnostic sects living in the First Century A.D. would be amazed by the very fact of our existence. The institutionalized violence of the Roman Empire had cut cultures from their roots. A widespread sense of alienation had taken hold. It was clear to many that the end was near, that the Powers-That-Be were corrupt, and that the mandate for the ancient world had been withdrawn. In Matthew 16:28, Jesus says, “There are some of those who are standing here who shall not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his Kingdom.” Yet the world did not end, not exactly, nor was the heavenly city lowered from the clouds.

Let us look more closely, though, at the peculiar phrasing of this statement. It informs us that the “Son of Man”—a role, perhaps, and not a specific person—will be coming “in” his Kingdom. This implies that his kingdom may be a kind of vehicle, although it is left to us to imagine what form this might take. We might choose to see this as a flying city, perhaps, or as the reenactment of a prehistoric record, or as a field of energy, or as the fullness of the primal body/mind, or as the utterance of a vision-serpent. If the world did not end, exactly, and if the kingdom did not sink deep roots in the earth, the existing order may nonetheless have passed away. A luminous city may have opened and departed.

Frustration with the uncooperative nature of the Apocalypse set in early on. Over the next 2000 years, it would be rescheduled five-dozen or so times. No matter how many of the predicted dates proved false, the idea never lost its attractiveness, and, after lying dormant for some period, it could quickly return to take possession of the psyche. In 1523, for example, scores of astrologers throughout Europe determined that a second Deluge would occur in 1524. This would be brought on by the conjunction of Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars, in the sign of Pisces. Since the Deluge was scheduled to start in London, many thousands of the city’s inhabitants fled. In all, more than 160 works by 56 authors either confirmed the prophesy or denounced it as a delusion.

Leonhard Reinman, Image of 1524 astrological conjunction predictive of Apocalypse, Nuremburg
Leonhard Reinman, Image of 1524 astrological conjunction predictive of Apocalypse, Nuremburg

When anticipation of the end of things takes hold, it is striking that the experience seems so immediate to those involved. It almost seems as though the experience existed in an already completed form, as though it were waiting for some small pretext to emerge.

Curiously, there is nothing in the word apocalypse itself that implies that the event must take place in the future. From the Greek “apokalyptein,” the word means simply “to uncover; to disclose; to reveal.” (The roots are “apo,” “off; away from,” and “kalyptein,” “to cover; to conceal.”) Certainly John, writing between A.D. 69 and A.D. 96, gives little or no indication that he is theorizing about events that will not take place for several thousand years. One of the prophesies then current, that of the Essenes, said that the end would occur in A.D. 70, perhaps the very year that John wrote. Here is John’s description of some of the instructions that he received:

Then the voice which I heard from heaven spoke to me again and said, “Go, take the little book which is open in the hand of the angel who stands on the sea and on the earth.” So I went to the angel and said to him, “Give me the little book.” And he said to me, “Take and eat it; and it will make your stomach bitter, but it will be as sweet as honey in your mouth.”

“Eat,” “stomach,” “bitter,” “sweet,” “honey,” “mouth”—these are very physical words, and the act in question could not be more direct. By the eating of the little book, John becomes—on some alchemical level—that which he sees and hears. Thus, it is possible that the predictions of the Essenes were accurate after all. If an apocalypse is the disclosure of previously hidden information, we could say that it occurred at the exact moment of John’s experience.

Max Beckman, Journey on a Fish, 1934
Max Beckman, Journey on a Fish, 1934

If we pause to look a bit closer at the word roots, at “apo” and “kalyptein,” we may be surprised to learn that the name “Calypso” also comes from the latter root. In the Odyssey, set sometime in the Bronze Age, the goddess Calypso enchants Odysseus with her singing and keeps him prisoner on her island, Ogygia, for seven years. When Odysseus departs, this could also be seen as an un-covering, as a small apocalypse. The world does not end; rather, Zeus sends Hermes to Calypso, with instructions that she should set the hero free. Threats are made. Calypso is quite annoyed at what she sees as a double-standard: the gods hate it when goddesses choose to have affairs with mortals, while they do not restrain their sexual urges in the least. She nonetheless provides Odysseus with water, wine, bread, a grove of trees to cut, a bronze ax with an olivewood handle, cloth to make sails, and whatever else is needed to build and supply his raft. As a final gift, she provides him with an in-depth knowledge of the stars. The whole of the story, the weaving of the spell and the uncovering, seems to take place at some occult angle to the present. It is relevant, perhaps, that seven years have gone by. “One thing happens,” says Homer, “and then the next.” The historical date is of no particular importance.

If the number seven is present in the story of Odysseus and Calypso, it is present in a relatively non-dramatic way. We are left to probe the esoteric significance of the number at our leisure. In John’s retelling of his vision, on the other hand, the number is obsessively repeated. Among other things, there are seven golden lampstands, seven churches that are in Asia, seven vials of wrath, seven heads on the Great Beast that rises out of the sea, seven plagues, seven thunders, seven stars in the hand of the Son of Man, seven trumpets that announce catastrophes, a lamb with seven horns and seven eyes, and, of course, the seven seals, which are scheduled to be opened. The Hebrew word for seven is “sheba,” which means “promise” or “oath.” It is a word that guarantees some form of fulfillment. In the form of “shiva,” it is also a seven day period of mourning that follows the death of a loved one. (While John wrote in Koine Greek, the number symbolism of the book is closely tied to the Old Testament.) However John may have understood it, the role played by the number seven in the book is clearly an ambiguous one, with a two-faced, Janus-like aspect. It is in some way connected to both destruction and perfection, and it points to the completion of a cycle.

To the eater of the little book, the end was something that was viscerally present, in all of its horror and beauty; it was also something that was waiting to be sprung upon the world, seemingly in the none too distant future, somewhere around 70 to 100 A.D.

2

Paul Lafolley, Thanaton III, 1989
Paul Lafolley, Thanaton III, 1989

So, what does it mean for the Apocalypse to take place in the present moment, and, somewhat paradoxically, to be always just about to occur? In January of 2009, I took part in a forum for Jasun Horsley’s article “Owning the Apocalypse: The Up Side of Annihilation.” December 21st, 2012, the end-date—according to some theorists—of a 5125-year Mayan cycle that had begun in 3114 B.C., was just a few years off. The year was acting as a kind of “strange attractor,” as a catalyst for certain subliminal hopes and fears, as a screen for the projection of archetypal contents, as a cure-all for those dispossessed by the whims of a decentralized plutocracy, as a perfect storm of vision and commercial branding. Some anticipated a pole-shift, resulting in world destruction; others envisioned a wave of mass-enlightenment. Like an inhabitable fish, a visceral longing for the Apocalypse was once more rising from the depths.

In this forum, S.J. wrote,

If galactic consciousness was only possible upon the deaths of six billion people, I would take the six billion if given a choice. Screw your Enlightenment! But I don’t even think that this is the right way to frame the issue. Personally, I feel that the shift has already taken place, and in a way has always been there. The Buddha, saints, mystics, shamans of all times and cultures experienced full awareness within this world, the Spell, the Matrix. In Mahayana Buddhism, it is affirmed that samsara is nirvana. The whole cycle of birth and rebirth, which is Maya the original Matrix, is the realm of enlightened awareness.

Jasun responded,

We are on the verge of something truly mind-blowing, and our resistance to the idea of mass death as something “negative” just shows, to me, how unready we are, even conceptually, for the magnitude of what is coming, as a species and as individuals. I can say this: the loss of identity which (I believe) is our only possibility for survival now will be far more terrifying (and undesirable) than any horrible death by apocalypse could ever be. Those of us who begin to experience this shift may well wish we’d been numbered with the lucky expendables. Galactic consciousness is nothing anyone in their right mind would volunteer for, and those dumb enough to do so, soon regret it.

Brian George, Aeonic Theatre, photogram, 2002
Brian George, Aeonic Theatre, photogram, 2002

It struck me as possible that these viewpoints were not mutually exclusive. To my way of thinking, the cosmos is already as perfect as it needs to be, although our perception of this larger context has been obscured from the dawn of recorded history, if not longer. Apocalypse pertains to the rolling on and rolling off of stage-sets, as embodied in, among other things, the 12 signs of the zodiac. These stage-sets activate the potentials that are encoded in the All. As they stomp and fret their hour upon the stage, the actors prove all but indifferent to the larger context from which they have come, yet they fear, on some level, that they are still the stuff of dreams. Always, it is space itself that acts.

A world disappears; the theatre in which this destruction is carried out does not have to go anywhere, or to evolve beyond what is already within the actors’ reach. The future does not necessarily follow upon the past, nor is the past only mechanically active in the present. As one stage-set disappears and another one appears, there is an interval, a pregnant pause, a dead zone, in which the vertical and horizontal axes get realigned. We may experience this as an earthquake or a tidal wave, as the highlighting of some seemingly random footnote, as a scream that causes the screamer to forget that he has a head, as a spark that shatters then reconstitutes the whole of the metalinguistic structure.

Many new things then become possible, but this may or may not result in the projection of destruction onto physical time/space. A continent sinks. The sun burns out. A wave consumes Valhalla, bringing to an end the blood-feast of the gods. The Venir and the Aesir, it must be said, are too drunk to be feeling any pain. They double over with laughter at how loudly the planets ring. Like leaves from the boughs of Yggdrasil, wind sweeps the gods and their messengers towards the depths of the nonexistent, towards the light of a cloudless sky. Or, one actor has been momentarily transported from the theatre. The pregnant pause could just as easily result in the ecstasy of a shamanic flight, in the seeding of the next Omphalos, or in the rebirth of the art of memory. Our world has been replaced with an almost exact duplicate. One actor has returned, only slightly the worse for wear, from his close encounter with the vertical axis, having reestablished contact with what existed before history.

Brian George, Renovation of the Spine, photogram, 2002
Brian George, Renovation of the Spine, photogram, 2002

That the Apocalypse is imminent, I do not doubt, but it is the meaning of the word imminent that I would like to call into question. Let me phrase this in a different way: we must be militantly open in our descriptions of how the horizontal and the vertical axes intersect. Viewed from the perspective of the horizontal axis, the Apocalypse is the eruption of repressed archetypal forces onto the stage-set of the objective world. It is the projection of the vertical axis onto history, the penetration of dead cultural forms by the violence of primordial energy. Viewed from the perspective of the vertical axis, however, the Apocalypse might best be understood as a reflexively triggered spectacle, a trial by fire at the boundary between worlds.

If such a trial is terrifying, it may, in the end, be good for the explorer’s health. It signifies, quite simply, that the explorer has successfully entered into the axis, taking the whole of both the personal and the collective psyche with him, and that he is being powered by a sufficiently explosive degree of force. Cities pop like bubbles. Swelling and collapsing, an ocean of dead poets roars, unable to pierce the silence that has thrust into his ears. The person who has entered is not the same as the being who will exit.

Upon exiting the axis, the explorer may discover that he has picked up a companion, that his shadow does not always imitate his movements, that it slips without warning to the back side of the mirror, that it treats the subject who casts it as a child to be punished. There seems no way to predict how long the earth will support his feet. Solidity is no longer a guarantee of permanence. In the explorer’s solar plexus, there are knots that have been loosened. His vision has become far more volatile than it was, and it is not clear who or what is seeing through his eyes. His head has become a radioactive wasteland, a conch blown by the ghosts of the Younger Dryas, a playground for the wind.

Victor Brauner, Totem of Wounded Subjectivity II, 1948
Victor Brauner, Totem of Wounded Subjectivity II, 1948

Any contact with the Double can reflexively prompt fear, which then spreads out to encompass a much wider range of fears, up to and including fear of a physical version of the Apocalypse. The light that flares from this dark presence may sear the explorer’s bones. His muscles may twitch and spasm. Great gulfs may open up. Seven vortices may pour their toxins on his tongue. If the Double has made him an offer that it is not safe to refuse, neither is it any safer to cooperate. If the Double has generously offered to serve as an instructor, the explorer has no way, at first, to guess the nature of its motives. The brighter and darker aspects of the Double may not seem to be connected. The same vision can be interpreted as a lesson or a trap, and it may very well be both.

A fleet of comets arcs towards Earth, from the Oort cloud or the Keiper belt, from the fog of the collective psyche. Refreshed from its sleep of 30,000 years, Pithovirus Sibericus declares itself a god. One-half micron in diameter, it spreads throughout the globe. The explorer dreams of a geomagnetic storm, of power grids gone dark, of the simultaneous meltdown of dozens of reactors. “Am I being told to start a cult?” he thinks. “Should I sound an alarm or just give away most of my clothes?” “Unknown unknowns” press on the explorer from all sides. One catastrophe is no more likely than another to occur. “No one knows the day or the hour” that our habits will prove impotent.

Half-focusing his eyes, suspending judgment on the teleology of the image, the explorer must keep his field of vision open. He must guard against what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.” A “species die-off,” for example, may be a kind of “objective correlative” for his fears. Grof’s “perinatal matrices” speak to this simultaneous existence of a beginning and an end. Apocalyptic images are encoded in the very process of our birth; any large-scale expansion of the explorer’s consciousness can reactivate the trauma of this earlier contraction. Such an experience is overwhelming, and immediate, and it may seem that there is no way out. But when an already completed story is reenacted for a subject, does the spectacle take place in the present, in the future, or in the past?

Biology both recapitulates and prefigures the larger process of cosmogenesis. In the same way that embryogenesis allows humans to give birth to human beings, there is also a process of cosmogenesis that allows the cosmos to give birth to primordial beings, or Aeons, whose downwardly mobile representative is the Double. Development can be projected across horizontal space, in time-cycles as vast as they are incomprehensible; it can also occur almost instantly through the vertical lightning flash of initiation.

The Goddess as Active Listener (Part 4)

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The Goddess as Active Listener (Part 4)

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Features Essays, Story Mythos
Victor Brauner, Disintegration of Subjectivity, 1951 (detail)
Victor Brauner, Disintegration of Subjectivity, 1951 (detail)

Editor’s Note: The full text of this work comes in ten parts, which we are releasing in three installments over three consecutive weeks. For Installment 1: Parts 1–3, click here. Below we present Installment 2: Part 4.

4

“Gnothi Seauton” or “Know Thyself”—attributed to Socrates

But also to Chilon of Sparta, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Solon of Athens, and Thales of Miletus. Juvenal, in his 11th Satire, claimed that the precept actually descended “de caelo”—directly out of heaven.

Fresco from the Temple of Isis, Pompei, 1st Century A.D.
Fresco from the Temple of Isis, Pompei, 1st Century A.D.

When I met Sue Castigliano, my speech teacher during senior year at Doherty Memorial High School, it was not at first apparent that she would one day change my life. I had never before had a teacher who had any sense of who I was, of the hole in my heart or the blockage in my psyche. She was from the Midwest, not obviously countercultural—I would find out otherwise—and her most noticeable virtues were such things as calmness, openness, acceptance, and curiosity. She dressed simply. She wore very little jewelry. She was not at all theatrical, and she certainly did not announce that our speech class would be about so many things other than speech. Gently pushing aside my defenses, she reached out and down through the soul to touch me on the most elemental level. Even now, looking back from a distance of more than 40 years, and far removed from the melodrama of that period, it is hard for me to imagine who, what, or where I would be if that meeting had never taken place. Again, I exhale a sigh of relief. 

It is said that when the student is ready the teacher will appear. Luckily, the teacher may also choose to appear when the student is not at all ready. She drags him, if need be kicking and screaming, into a new, more direct, but also more paradoxical relationship with the self. Socrates’ injunction, “Gnothi Seauton” or “Know Thyself,” which, according to Pausanias, was inscribed on the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, is far more demanding than it has any right to be. It is a simple statement, composed of only two small words. The injunction becomes more demanding, not less, as we attempt to translate our all-too-often inflated insights into action. Who, exactly, is doing the knowing? What is the nature of the self that presents itself to be known? Perhaps what we see is the illuminated crescent at the edge of an—almost—unimaginable sphere. As with the subtle but subversive presence of the teacher, this crescent becomes more visible as we are forced to grapple with the limits of our vision, until, quite suddenly perhaps, we are led into the dark. To begin to grasp the “what” of what we are, we must let go of the fixed version of the “who.”

Is the ego the knower of the self, or is the self the knower of the ego? Perhaps the soul is itself a mask, soon to morph into a different form with the astronomical rotation of the fashion industry. Although, as a matter of convenience, I use it here, I do not like the word “ego.” Over the past six years or so, I have tended to use it less and less. I have just as little use for or patience with the all too popular term “seeker.” I far prefer Picasso’s formulation. He states—somewhat arrogantly, perhaps—“I do not seek; I find.” The term “teacher” I like more, but this term, if casually used, has problems of its own. Too many students of famous gurus, for example, can’t seem to wait to give away all of their own intuitive authority to the teacher. It can be difficult for the teacher to be idolized, either spiritually or intellectually, and many are tempted to want to turn their students into small, submissive versions of themselves. This can be as true in a PhD program in archeology as in an ashram. 

Clearly, good teachers are needed to transmit information, to help students to discover themselves, and to model certain skills. We cannot do without them. Even the most abstract of knowledge is not abstract; at least in the first stages, it must come attached to a living body. In this essay, however, it is the more primal concept of “teacher”—the teacher as spiritual catalyst—that I am attempting to explore. If such teachers are, in a different way, essential, they may sometimes tend to hold themselves to a lower standard than their students: They may stamp the void with their brand; they may speak highly of their total unimportance; in an energetic contest with Joe Average, they may judge themselves the victor; they may take themselves as seriously as their most obedient followers; they may believe that the light has more to teach them than the darkness; they may take as much as they give; they may have the power to catalytically intervene but be unwilling to let go.

It is not that such teachers lack the knowledge that they claim; they may very well possess it, but they do not give it freely. They do not prefer to overflow. Rather, they choose to portion this knowledge out, and, in the process, they can come to believe their own P.R. How easy it is for the once enlightened teacher—accidentally on purpose—to be sucked into the vortex of his own charisma! Power intoxicates, and the gods do like to drink. The student may then become sadomasochistically attached to his own childhood, to the deadness of his feet and the blockage in his spine. He will not make of his heart a meeting place or expect that his head will click open like an aperture. He will see his mind as an electrochemical databank, as an empty space to be filled up with the teacher’s big ideas. He will not learn how to leap from a great height, to move into and beyond death, or to hatch the universe from an egg. He will not dare to trust that his energy is a kind of self-existent vehicle.

I think that seekers often fixate on the “shattering of the ego” as a way to prove to themselves that they actually do exist; if they do not possess any breadth of cosmic vision, they are nonetheless experts in the role from which they are trying to escape. It is far more problematic for the seeker to accept that he is where he is supposed to be, even if he has no memory at all of when this choice was made. This is not to say that he should not speak truth to power, or take action against injustice, or withhold his empathy from a person in a dead-end situation because supposedly this person has “created his own reality”; no, I say only that he should challenge himself to grasp the larger shape of his life-story, to intuit how daimon and persona fit together. The real challenge is not to be elsewhere; it is to be, more fully, here. And that, of course, is the question: just what do we mean by here? 

Fresco from the Temple of Isis, Pompei, 1st Century A.D.

Once, we lived in a city that we loved, a city in which humans mixed freely with the gods. That city would seem to have long ago disappeared, and yet it calls to us from the depths of the horizon. Our hand rests on the doorknob of the house where we came of age. Driven by implanted memories, the human genome dreams of a real voyage to the stars. 

It is 1971. And, as my hunt for occult wealth intensifies, I am attempting to round up my predecessors. I would determine, first of all, if there was ever anyone else like me who had existed on the Earth. Arrogance and Insecurity, my twin ravens, have returned with a few drops of mercury for my cup. I have set up Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Rimbaud, and Giorgio de Chirico as my makeshift Holy Trinity. At midnight, periodically, a black pyramid will descend to crush my skull. This is less fun than it sounds.

In a manuscript from 1913, Giorgio de Chirico writes

To live in the world as in an immense museum of strangeness, full of curious multi-colored toys which change their appearance, which, like little children, we sometimes break to see how they are made on the inside, and, disappointed, realize they are empty.1Giorgio de Chirico, “Manuscript from the Collection of Paul Eluard,” from Giorgio de Chirico, James Thrall Soby, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966, page 246

As if to prove that my potential genius is a toy, and indifferent to the scale of my embarrassment, not de Chirico but de Chirico’s daimon seems to reach inside my head, whose contents he then removes to view them from odd angles. O infinite extension of the Argonaut! The daimon’s arrogance is breathtaking. It is clear that he feels no obligation to put the original contents back, so that de Chirico, the 1913 version, from his squalid studio in the rue Compagne-Premiere, somehow stares out of my eyes. In the end, I can barely recognize my mother, who begins to look suspiciously like a manikin, so that I jump when she suddenly appears, with a plate of sardines, at my door.

“The first man must have seen auguries everywhere,” writes de Chirico, “He must have trembled at each step that he took.”2Giorgio de Chirico, “Manuscript from the Collection of Paul Eluard,” from Giorgio de Chirico, James Thrall Soby, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966, page 248 It is 1917. The end of the Vietnam War is at hand, and, disoriented that it is not his shrapnel wound but the flu that has carried off Apollinaire, I am recovering from a bout of nervous exhaustion in Ferrara. “Stone engineers, though silent,” I shout, “please WASH UP ON THE BEACH. Give praise to Hygenia, the Muse.” Depositing treasures, a wave lifts me, and I can hear my floorboards creak like tectonic plates. It is 1971, the year of the industrial-strength slaughter at Verdun, and I struggle to understand why I am hovering six feet above my body. My head looks fine, so why can’t I get in? Luckily, the luminous acorn of my genius is intact. Depositing treasures, a wave lifts me, and I can hear my floorboards creak like tectonic plates. When I turn, the door’s frame is the only thing that stands.

Giorgio de Chirico, Metaphysical Composition, 1914
Giorgio de Chirico, Metaphysical Composition, 1914

Between 1954, the year of my birth, and 1973, 4.6 million tons of explosives are dropped on North Vietnam. Eggs of jellied fire do not play favorites with the pawns of geopolitics. Napalm burns both actors and observers to the bone, and then keeps on burning, in the souls of US citizens as well. Agent Orange defoliates at least 11,969 square miles of the land that is said to be “beloved by snakes.” I am shocked by the infinitely ballooning shadow of my country, and yet, and yet, this shadow is familiar. At my feet, an abyss opens, and I stare into its depths. “How noble are your objectives!” a voice calls from below. “You have stamped your tiny foot against the Empire! You have raged against the war machine!” My innocence sticks in my throat, and I find that I cannot breathe. 

Suitably chastened, I bit by bit withdraw my energies from the stage of social justice to refocus them on a more pragmatic goal, on my slapstick perfection of the role of poete maudit. My anger then prompts the transvaluation of all values. Revolution by night prompts the achievement of omnipotence, that is, of a hollow, toy-sized version thereof, which is nonetheless somewhat satisfying. Following in the sacred footsteps of Rimbaud, I do my best to practice the “systematic derangement of the senses”—as though my senses had not so far been adequately deranged, as though I had not lost some 98 percent of them at birth. I begin to wear a beret and smoke a historically-accurate clay pipe. The grand rhetorical gesture is supreme, as in this passage from A Season in Hell, in which Rimbaud reminisces that “Disaster was my god. I called to my executioners to let me bite the ends of their guns, as I died. Spring brought to me the idiot’s terrifying laughter.”3Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, translated by Wallace Fowlie, The University of Chicago Press, 1966, page 173

“Je est un autre,” “I is an other.”4Letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville, 15 May 1871 As was specified by Breton, true beauty should be convulsive. Nietzsche is a better friend than Jesus, who had followers, who were Christians, who in their current versions are far less likeable than when they had volunteered to be martyrs. What a nerve to have chickened out on the Apocalypse, the one in 72 AD. An experience of the “Eternal Return” is triggered by the turning pedals of my bicycle. It is almost certain that, any day now, Parmenides will provide me with the key to perpetual motion. A dragonfly landing on a milkweed pod is somehow taken for a prophesy. Yogic breathing exercises will yet give birth to a race of cyborg Ubermenchen. Always, the entire visible world is about to pass out of existence. 

Victor Brauner, Disintegration of Subjectivity, 1951
Victor Brauner, Disintegration of Subjectivity, 1951

If I, as “Brian George,” now exist in more than one location, you must place the blame squarely on the other one, the other Brian, who is dead. As the bird-chirps of the Underworld echo in my ears, I can feel the hand of a goddess still resting on my shoulder. 

The process of self-discovery is a paradoxical one, as I have said, which for most of us demands the steady hand of a guide, of a living person who is fated to perform the role of the psychopomp. His or her magnetic power draws us into the orbit of the self. The teacher confronts us with an inexplicable presence, a presence which, as we torture our minds to demystify its movements, we understand less and less. There is no way to encircle the motives of such a presence in advance. They cannot be grasped from the outside in, or as a matter of theory. They are always more and other than they were. For each clear purpose, there is always an unmediated shadow, within which a far vaster purpose breathes. Given the importance of this role—the fact that billions of bits of information may not add up to real knowledge, and that knowledge, left to its own devices, is no substitute for vision—it is shocking that students can go from k-1 through grade 12 without ever meeting a teacher who might serve in this capacity. But then again, a public school is probably the last place that one should expect to find such guidance, and the tarred and feathered pyschopomp would most often be run out of town on a rail.

What would have happened to me if I had not met this particular teacher when I did, if she had travelled to some city other than Worcester from Ohio, if she had made use of the more typical “one-size-fits-all” approach, if the snakes from Minos had not wrapped around her arms? I might have eventually become more or less who or what I am—assuming that I did not slip and fall into psychosis—but I would lack a sense of trust in the origin of things, a sense of confidence equal to my desire for self-realization. As self-determined as I like to believe myself to be, so much of what and who I am is the result of the well-timed intervention of others, in this case Sue Castigliano, who so generously gave what I could not provide for myself. 

Through the years of adolescent angst, I had grown away from childhood without making any progress towards adulthood. My parents had divorced when I was four years old, and my mother never quite recovered from the experience. From the time of their divorce until the day he died, my mother spoke less than a hundred words to my father. His name had gone into her black book of real and imagined wrongs. She did not forgive. It would not be taken out. As though out of nowhere, the happy nuclear family had exploded. I remember the shock of being evicted from the garden, at whose gate a fiery sword revolved. I remember how, in the short period before this, I would get into fistfights for no particular reason, from a sheer excess of energy, for the joy of it. I would wake up singing with the birds without even being aware that I was singing. How I treasure those few early years as an extrovert.

At the age of five, I had been unofficially appointed to serve as a kind of surrogate parent for my mother. As though she and not I were in need, I would sometimes rock her as she sobbed, uncontrollably, in my arms. I had to pretend to be strong enough for both of us. 

I was left with an unacknowledged sense of abandonment. Distantly aware of being angry, perhaps a bit more aware of having lost my sense of trust, of the ache in my heart, I knew these emotions only through their symptoms. I did not choose to confront my reflection in the mirror, for fear of falling through. I no longer enjoyed getting into fistfights; it had become a chore, not a pleasure. Instead, I got into arguments, in which I would go to any lengths to prove the dolt-like nature of my opponents. Somewhat later, starting in my senior year of high school—at the same time, curiously, that I took my first literary baby steps—I would often be very hesitant to drift off into sleep, for fear that I would not know who I was when I woke up, of not being sane. Planets would taunt me with their superior musical ability. I could barely play the recorder. I went through a long period of being terrified of perspective. I saw distance as a threat. I would not allow my eyes to drift down the converging lines of Main Street, for fear that I might be sucked out of my skin, for fear that the horizon would eat me. I was careful to focus only on signs and objects in the foreground. 

Black magic had turned the too conscientious child into a headless plastic doll. “What a stupid place the world is,” it thought. “Let me share my new-found freedom.” Where the self should be, there were atoms, clashing. There were voids inside of voids. Used to being around adults, I could camouflage my thoughts in articulate form. On a good day, I could pass for a responsible young revolutionary. In due course, my comrades would overthrow the government. The industrial age would spontaneously combust. Chants would levitate the Pentagon. An urban gorilla at 17, I could strip and reassemble my attitude like an AK 47. Bourgeois robots would creak and beg for oil on a forced march to the amber fields of grain. A part of me was still very much a child, hurt and confused, who had no desire to expose his vulnerabilities to others. I wanted to disappear into the branches of my favorite apple tree, to daydream for hours as the clouds changed shape, to feel the Earth darken as the afternoon wore on. I would watch in secret as smoke billowed from a factory, beneath whose stacks the ant-sized workers crawled.

I cannot say exactly how Sue Castigliano changed me. I can only say that through and because of her a change took place. Stepping from the cave-mouth of a dream, the Goddess of Active Listening took my hand. By the end of the year, my concept of strength had been dissolved and reconfigured. I was less afraid of fear. Without yet knowing how to access what I knew, I had begun to see my wounds as so much raw material, the dark matter with which an alchemist might one day create wealth. It is as though my teacher had said, “What you see before you is now yours for the asking. The world is no longer a vast and anonymous space. It is a book that waits to be opened. Here, open it, and read.”

Notes

Notes
↑1 Giorgio de Chirico, “Manuscript from the Collection of Paul Eluard,” from Giorgio de Chirico, James Thrall Soby, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966, page 246
↑2 Giorgio de Chirico, “Manuscript from the Collection of Paul Eluard,” from Giorgio de Chirico, James Thrall Soby, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1966, page 248
↑3 Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, translated by Wallace Fowlie, The University of Chicago Press, 1966, page 173
↑4 Letter to Paul Demeny, Charleville, 15 May 1871

The Long Curve of Descent

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The Long Curve of Descent

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Features Fiction, Story
Brian George, Archetypal Figure with Bow and Lightning Arrow, 2004 (detail)
Brian George, Archetypal Figure with Bow and Lightning Arrow, 2004 (detail)

Brian George, Hawk Mummy Floating on the Ocean, 1992

One morning, when I was four years old, I was sitting on the third-floor back porch of my family’s three-decker. It was 1958, and Worcester, Massachusetts, was still regarded as the industrial heart of New England. Looking out, I could see smoke puffing from tall smokestacks, a freight-yard and a railroad bridge, hills with houses perched on them that rolled into the distance, and, a few miles off, on one of the highest hills, the gothic architecture of Holy Cross College. How wonderful the day was! I could not have asked for a more perfect moment. My grandmother had given me a large chunk of clay. And then, I was no longer looking out over Worcester; no, I was hovering above the Amazon, making snakes, canoes, and villagers out of the substance in my hands.

As I worked, however, I became frustrated. It occurred to me that I had succumbed to a creative block. I grew angry. I could not believe what I was seeing. My hands were small. My mind just barely worked. My imagination seemed like a blunt instrument. As absurd as it sounds, I remembered what it was like to create real snakes and villagers.

Since that morning, I have explored a variety of methods to get from the place where my feet are planted to the larger space that surrounds me, which is not, of course, mine in any personal sense. The path has been a labyrinthine one. My raids on the inexpressible have imposed many contradictory demands. Scholarship and meditation have opened onto vision, onto a mode of knowledge as intimate as it is vast. An ocean, of a sort, boiled, and I could feel the enormous pressure on my skin. Convulsing on the current, I was thrown here and there. Over time, the heat of vision has given way to a much cooler sense of transparency. But always, there are gaps, which demand that I let go of any sense of certainty, which also ask that the reader play a more active role. When a leap of association has been left hanging in mid-air, the reader should use his or her intuition to complete it, thus creating a connection that could not otherwise have existed.

Without gaps being left, and without the active participation they require of all involved, visionary writing may serve as no more than a travelogue. This approach has led some to accuse me of obscurity. Obscure my work may be, but it is not accidentally so, and I would be happy to be able to move more directly towards my goals.

In a critique of my essay “Memories of Mr. Trippi: The Trauma of an Urban Shaman,” Dave Hanson wrote:

So as you step in and out of the implicate order I can only suggest looking at your intention, honing your control, looking for opportunities to heal others, and seriously questioning everything you experience on the journey. I would like your writing more if it was more simple and direct, but that is me. I don’t know that just because something comes to us from ‘the spirits’ it is any more meaningful than the sound of the toilet flushing. I’m surrounded by people who ‘see things.’ I don’t understand the underlying meanings of most of it, so I plant more vegetables.

My dog died. I miss him. I can feel his body under my hand. My wife is working too hard and worries too much. I have a broken ankle and hate crutches. I can’t do what I love to do and when I’m back on my feet I’ll waste precious time. A Native American spirit showed me a painting I am supposed to do, over twenty years ago, and I haven’t done it…Can your visions help heal another? That’s all there is.1In August of 2009, I posted an essay in Reality Sandwich called “Memories of Mr. Trippi: The Trauma of an Urban Shaman.” “The Long Curve of Descent” grew out of an exchange with writer and shamanic teacher Dave Hanson. I have kept Dave’s comments exactly as they appeared. My response, however, has been expanded and revised a number of times, most recently in April of 2017. It might seem absurd to waste time and energy on something as insubstantial as an online forum. I take dialogue seriously, however. I like to be surprised. What sense does it make to prejudge the source of this surprise? I find that offhand comments—whether from forums or ongoing correspondence—can serve as creative prompts, which nudge me to see things from unexpected angles, to give form to my intuitions, and to say things that I might not otherwise say.

I responded: As regards “healing”: my small role as a healer has to do with the reclamation of collective memory. In my explorations, bits and pieces of lost history become clear, “as if lit for the first time by a brilliant star,” as de Chirico would say. For whatever it is worth, I then attempt to tell others what I see. For me, healing has to do with the discovery of our wholeness, which exists, to some extent, beyond us. This challenge is like the real gesture that we make with our prosthetic hand. There is water in a cup. It waits for centuries for us to drink it. Yet, though broken, we have never ceased to be whole.

Upon birth, having exited from the All beneath the stern gaze of Necessity, we are only allowed to bring a few meaningless details with us. One by one, the pages vanish from the book, as, earlier, our footprints had vanished from the ocean. Only mist marks the biodomes of the cities that we left. A buoy clangs, in the distance, somewhere. We have forgotten more than even the omnipotent are aware of, far more than they know themselves. Trauma locks the doors to the dark theatre of the body. We Are What We Eat: the bread of dreams, the sewage of the dead. The rest is junk DNA—or so our controllers would prefer us to believe. A strange presence guards the other half of each symbol.

I would speak truth to the powers that oppress us, who are not in any way the monsters that we think. As we breathe out, they breathe in, and vice versa. It is our pose of wide-eyed innocence that has tempted them to act badly. Our stealth has been impeccable; it has, perhaps, been TOO impeccable, by a factor of 10,000. We have shown few tells.

“Who are we? Where do we come from? What are we here for? Where are we going?” These are the questions that the writer and the artist have been hoodwinked by society into asking. Such questions are stupid. We should know better. It is possible that they constitute a crime against the Soul. In the stomach of each reader, I would plant and tend the acorn of Omphalos, the one intersection, in order to make the asking of such questions obsolete.

Brian George, Archetypal Figure with Bow and Lightning Arrow, 2004

You correctly place a great emphasis on healing, but please do not underestimate the energies that one can transmit at a distance, or the shock of synchronistic knowledge, whose spark jumps from the writer’s hand. “You have just woven together about ten important things that I was thinking about today,” wrote one reader. “There is a project that I’ve been putting off starting for a year, and now you have pushed me to do it.” One well-placed action can reconstitute the Web. True, cyberspace is not hyperspace, but perhaps it can function as a crude approximation. And it is always possible that the one is—very sneakily—preparing us for the other.

You have asked, “Can your visions heal another?” I tend to view myself more as a catalyst than a healer—a role that has a higher percentage of the energy of the Trickster—but the two roles are related. The term “shaman” is used somewhat ironically in the essay. I would make no claim to be one, any more than I would speak casually about world transformation, as so many do. There are more than enough snake-oil salesmen. Preferring to learn from real snakes, I would reverse engineer the most dangerous of toxins. What the snakes do not know, the birds may be willing to volunteer, so long as one is open to the removal of one’s head. From long before Gobekli Tepe had been built, such birds have been looking for new spheres with which to juggle. They may or may not choose to return some version of the plaything to its owner. Neither snakes nor birds see safety as important. As goes the head, so goes the year from which it comes.

Jasun Horsley once pointed out that whenever I would go to write “2012” it would always come out “2112”—a kind of metaphysical Freudian slip. One antediluvian date is probably just as good as another. Can one individual be healthy if the world died long ago? As I probe my wounds, I am hesitant to give others the peace of mind that I do not allow to myself. Shock at one’s corpse-like decrepitude can be viewed as a big plus. “Vision” and “healing” may not always coincide.

Since the end of the Paleolithic Era, it is possible that we have been riding a long curve of descent, in which all things once transparent have become more and more opaque. We do not remember what our hands are for. Our speech is inert. Our intelligence cannot exit from the top part of the skull, a door whose key has been broken off in its keyhole, an aperture that lacks oil. Once, our story had been written on the leaves of a great tree. The leaves have been torn off. The glyphs on them are illegible, and the tree is now a stump. Preprogrammed from beyond the clockwork of the stars, the decline that we have experienced does not appear as such; no, some trick of perspective causes us to hallucinate an ascent.

Brian George, The Conjuration, 2002

Archetypes break like toys, left over from a childhood that never did exist. We discard them. We ask, “Why is it so difficult for us to see into the cosmos?” We speak loudly. We do not hear the response. The cultures that we dismembered have been sucked into a cloud. Their outcries circle, and then fall like rain. The last civic structures are consumed by a decentralized plutocracy. “Who put you in charge?” we demand. “Do you have any vision at all?” The answers we get do not correspond to the questions that we ask, or rather, they do not correspond to the answers that we want. “May you live in interesting times,” goes the Chinese curse. We do, for better or for worse, live in “interesting times,” in which we must reconfigure all traditionally fixed roles. At the age of 62, I am just beginning to figure out what my public role might be.

A role is a social construct, with a set of rules attached; society can make no rules that the Self is obligated to obey. Why should space concern itself with the shoe size of its mouthpiece? To point people towards what they know but have chosen to forget may be no more than an exercise in futility. Some types of exercise are almost certainly good; others, not so much. Still, I find myself at a perpetual beginning as I test the strength of my lineage, tongue-tied, a bit nervous, as naked as a child who has just stepped from the womb. And here I had pretended to have the answers to each question! “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself,” as Whitman said.

For such is the prerogative of the preexistent Voice, and of its vehicle: WE.

All periods cohere in the one moment of my Memory. With a shock, one notes that the old becomes new. By the power of my austerities I have vacuumed up all of the water from the ocean. Cities shine there. I am Death—the Shatterer of Worlds. My weapon liberates multitudes.

Notes

Notes
↑1 In August of 2009, I posted an essay in Reality Sandwich called “Memories of Mr. Trippi: The Trauma of an Urban Shaman.” “The Long Curve of Descent” grew out of an exchange with writer and shamanic teacher Dave Hanson. I have kept Dave’s comments exactly as they appeared. My response, however, has been expanded and revised a number of times, most recently in April of 2017. It might seem absurd to waste time and energy on something as insubstantial as an online forum. I take dialogue seriously, however. I like to be surprised. What sense does it make to prejudge the source of this surprise? I find that offhand comments—whether from forums or ongoing correspondence—can serve as creative prompts, which nudge me to see things from unexpected angles, to give form to my intuitions, and to say things that I might not otherwise say.

Autumnal Fallout

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Autumnal Fallout

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Features Audio, Essays, Story Society (Multitudes), culture, tech
Brian George, Archaic Weapons, 2004 (detail)
Brian George, Archaic Weapons, 2004 (detail)

Editor’s Note: The Cold War confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union reached a point of peak intensity, nearly leading to nuclear war, with the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 14–28, 1962. We are pleased to present here, not only the author’s remembrance of those and related events, but also an audio recording of him reading the essay below.

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Brian George, Archaic Weapons, 2004

Brian George, Archaic Weapons, 2004

Student at Rochester University: “Was the bomb exploded at Alamogordo during the Manhattan Project the first one to be detonated?” Dr. Robert Oppenheimer: “Well, yes. In modern times, of course.”

∞

It would be hard to communicate to someone growing up today just how widespread was the fallout from the threat of the Atomic Bomb. From July 16th, 1945, when the first bomb was tested over the Jornada del Muerto Desert, its occult light had continued to throw shadows from each object. The danger was not abstract; it was imminent, and it changed our whole way of looking at the world. At any moment, a chain-reaction might reach out to take us by the hand, and there was no telling where we would end up. By the time that we got there, our hands might no longer be able to grasp objects. Our minds might be blinded by their own illumination, which was said to be brighter than 10,000 suns. Our vision might no longer go where we directed it; instead, it might plummet to the far side of the planet. We might not be able to distinguish the brain of Einstein from a cloud, or from the folds of the shockwave that had spread out from Ground Zero, or from the elegant simplicity of the equation that he dreamed. Which direction would be “up,” and which would be “down”? Our feet might get no traction on the sky.

I vividly remember grammar school nuclear holocaust drills in the early 1960s: Get under your desk, put your head down on your knees, then put your hands on your head. (!?!) Yes, that should work, much as closing your eyes would make you invisible to the rest of the human race. The mind boggles at such unintentional comedy, in which the punch-line is the city going up like flash-paper. Such unintentional comedy was not a laughing matter! We did not consider laughing, yet how was it possible to do anything else but laugh?

In retrospect, I can see how truly small we were. Our lineage was obscure, and deliberately so; we were not left with the flicker of an idea about our strength. At the end of the last ice age, a war had rearranged the whole surface of the Earth. Cities popped like bubbles. Words became armies and chants destroyed empires. Millions died. Suns ate each other. Mirrors fought against their own reflections. Whales left their bones on the Andes. Gigantic chunks of our memory were wiped out. When we crawled out from our net of subterranean tubes, there was not much that we recognized. We were few in number, and hungry. Our eyes were hypnotically fixed on large objects in the foreground. Space, somehow, had become opaque, and even the laws of physics had been altered.

In 1962, we were only just starting to remember how to say our ABCs. We were the interchangeable extras in an internecine drama, whose stage-sets we saw, but whose scripts were directed from the depths of the Unconscious. Use us once and throw us away. We were caterpillars whose chrysalises would not have a chance to develop. Instead of wings, we would have Thalidomide-style flippers. It didn’t really matter if we were crouched beneath our desks or playing in the schoolyard. At best, when the blast took us, we might leave the imprints of our shadows on a wall. Looking backwards over our shoulders, these would seem as poignant to us as 18th Century cut-out paper silhouettes. Steam would leak from them, due to pressure from trapped oceans. Then tiny lightning bolts would flash, decalibrated. Our DNA would unzip. We would see the light, an artificial one, yet we would not know if the light saw us, and our voyage into it would seem more terrifying than staying where we were. Yanked back through our navels, we would wake up neither here nor there.

Brian George, Bird with Vortex and Primordial Bow, 2004

Brian George, Bird with Vortex and Primordial Bow, 2004

We had too much unfinished business. We would not be able to move smoothly to the outer edge of light, and then into the space beyond. A network of past actions would confront us, of which we were, until then, almost totally unaware. Our primal forms would get stuck. A great stadium would unfold out of a storm-drain, towering through the void, just as that storm-drain had unfolded from a pinhead. There, a supernatural Olympiad would be held. Banners would flap in the epileptic breeze. With four limbs or eight, and screaming for our blood, the best of the interspecies champions would appear. They would pop up from their periods. We would first have to determine how many hands we had. Also, why did none of them hold weapons? With a hiss of electricity, we would move straight into our targets, like boxers that had landed punches on the chin of the Beyond, only to find that they were miles from the fight. In the meantime, as we watched, our opponents would have cut us limb from limb. They would eat our hearts and flatten out our force-fields. The records of our passing would be less clear than a Rorschach blot. Runes would comment on our ambiguity. Sailors tangled in Sargasso wrecks would wag their fingers in judgment, as they boasted about the progress they were making. The human sculptures from Pompeii would mock us for our lack of “significant form.” In 5000 years, if our relics were to be shown in a museum, the curators would have to install electron microscopes, through which visitors could observe the haunted skid-marks that we left.

We were fetal nebulae. We were seers who could not read their instruction manuals; yet we could not do without them, and we chewed on them like pacifiers. 12,000 years ago, we had turned to run from the Lords of the Scalar Flying Guillotine, and we only just noticed that a flash had wiped them from the Earth. What a joy it was, to discover that the vitrified city that stretched before us had belonged to someone else. It was the purest of good luck that such a thing had happened. We were wide-eyed children, who would not hurt a fly. Nothing scared us more than the mile-long shadows that stretched out from our feet; some day we would figure out the best way to remove them. There were bad people out there. To teach them a lesson, we would suffer. The rumors of our death had not been greatly exaggerated. The horror was prodigious. Few had ever observed such suffering as ours! Yet mistakes were made. We were weather balloons that had crash-landed on the sky. If we saw the light, then there was no reason that we would have wanted to experience such a thing. There were presences within it, protean ones, who seemed all too familiar, and the light itself looked painful. Rituals would be held, or so we had heard, in which they would force us to confront our ancient fears. There was one thing that did not add up, however: that these protean presences trembled at the thought of our return. We were just the tiny children of the Jornada del Muerto Desert, with wide eyes that we did not dare to open. We were ciphers in training. We would have left the one world just to prove that we were impotent in the next.

Brian George, Black Sun with Descending Skeletons, 2002

Brian George, Black Sun with Descending Skeletons, 2002

Sides had been chosen, an age ago. It was 1962. There was no way to avoid the confrontation that was coming. There was no way to sidestep the jagged ruins in the foreground, whose spectral light illuminated the darkest corners of the Psyche. Still, “Duck and Cover” may have been as useful a strategy as any other, and I can appreciate the thought behind these Vedic Neo-Dada preparations.

Ritual gesture can have an impact on a multitude of levels, and to “go through the motions” is at times the only practical course of action. Duck and Cover was, I think, a legacy from the Second World War, during which the U.S. government launched massive rubber and scrap metal drives, which, as it turned out, were designed more to improve public morale than because the government didn’t have access to rubber and scrap metal. The principle seemed to be: it is always better to do something rather than nothing. In the face of an invasion by the Absolute, we must see to it that we died in the proper crouching pose.

My memories from the year of the Cuban Missile Crisis are quite strange and, I would say, almost wonderful. The emotions that it stirs are bittersweet and complex; an ache starts in my solar plexus and spreads upwards to my heart. The crisis happened in October, about a month after the start of the school year. In Worcester, Massachusetts, where I lived, it seemed as though the leaves were just beginning to change color—red and gold—and yet, already, there were many on the ground. Still, I can hear them crunching underfoot as I walked to school at 7:30 AM, and, still, I can see them floating from the trees. With each foot that they fell they seemed to move ever slower, coming almost to a stop, until that morning became a memory of itself. Then I fell into that memory; I have not stopped falling since.

This was probably the first time that I became aware of the possibility of my own death, as well as of the possible destruction of the rest of the human race and the planet. But the sensation was that of the Japanese Cherry Blossom Festival: a sense of the beauty and the transience of all things washed over me—or, perhaps I should say: blew over me. Behind the wind, there was another and much bigger wind that seemed like it was always just about to blow. This wind was the wind of our own depth of coiled energy, an alchemical wind, which for aeons had been sealed in its althanor. We sensed that we were guilty; we did not know of what. We were just kids on our way to school. We were only trying to get away with staring out of the window! Why should we be expected to pay the price for the dismantling of the third dimension? Still, it seemed that we were somehow in this up to our ears.

As we stared at our hands, it was easy enough to tell that our solidity had been compromised. They flickered, at times, like a TV signal that was not quite coming in. There were many questions that we did not think to ask. Among these were the following: If we were the receivers, then from what station was the signal being broadcast? Was only the bull’s-eye of the circular test pattern real, and why did it remind us of a nuclear alert? Would the late night hum continue to get louder until it shook apart the atoms of each set? Just who was in control of the vertical and the horizontal axes? There was information missing. We should probably have worn our adjustable antennas! Then again, there was no one left who could be trusted to adjust them. Our teachers only added to the metaphysical static. Our parents were the servants of a technological pod. They were not really our parents. In any case, they were dealing with their own pre-programmed problems with adjustment.

We knew too much, by far, without knowing that we knew anything. Just recently, we had decided to take our powers out of storage, and our ignorance was a danger to the cosmos as a whole. In our toy ships, with shovels in hand, we would set sail from our sandbox! With our miniaturized brains, we would boldly go where no man had gone before! The path was not a straight one, however, and the arc of our discovery bent towards the Abyss. We had stepped into the last act of a drama that had been set in motion years before our births, in the springtime of the world. Then, war was a game that the omnipotent seers played; death was an adventure, and the ocean was a vast but comprehensible text. Not only could we read the glyphs inside each atom, we could also read the emptiness on which they had been written. The gods were our contraptions. We had little respect for the authorities that would bar our access to “junk” DNA. We were living mirrors, from whose backs the mercury had not yet been removed. An oath prompted us to throw away almost everything we had, recklessly, and to cover our tracks by destroying the horizon. How infinitely strange it was to be a leaf that somehow did not know that it was hanging from a tree. At last, we had tied the year into a perfect figure eight. October, as predicted, had arrived.

Brian George, Autumnal Leaf-Head

Brian George, Autumnal Leaf-Head

It was the 14th of October, 1962, and the Doomsday Clock was reading at 12 minutes before 12:00. As we made our way to school, with our book bags on our shoulders, we could hear the newly fallen leaves crunch underfoot, like the bones of ancient warriors, like the husks of derelict gods, and we were struck dumb by the wonderful stillness of the moment. The beauty of the flame-like foliage was a harbinger of the descent of actual flame; the gentle falling of the leaves was perhaps a prelude to the imminent vaporization of our bodies, and to the gentle descent of our ashes through the air.

Antagonistic Cooperation as Mind Jazz: Ralph Ellison vs. Amiri Baraka (as Reimagined by Greg Thomas and Greg Tate)

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Antagonistic Cooperation as Mind Jazz: Ralph Ellison vs. Amiri Baraka (as Reimagined by Greg Thomas and Greg Tate)

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Features Cinema Society (Multitudes), culture
Romare Bearden, Train Whistle Blues, 1979 (detail)
Romare Bearden, Train Whistle Blues, 1979 (detail)
Editor’s note: We’re pleased to welcome Greg Thomas and Greg Tate to Metapsychosis. Greg Thomas shared this video with us, a brilliant example of the free play of thought we seek to cultivate, with sly contemporary relevance; and Brian George graciously offered a review, while providing historical context for readers unfamiliar with the protagonists (and their doubles).

On February 16th, 2016, the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, located just off of Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, hosted a debate between cultural scholars Greg Thomas and Greg Tate, with Thomas acting as an advocate for Ralph Ellison and Tate acting as an advocate for Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). Alternately, given the prominence of the readings from both authors, the debate could be seen as one between Ellison and Baraka, with Thomas and Tate acting as the commentators. Both incisive and free-flowing, the rhythm of the exchange could be described as a kind of “mind jazz.” The debate was conceived as a (slightly belated) tribute to the 50th anniversary of the publication of Baraka’s Blues People: Negro Music in White America, a book over which Ellison and Baraka clashed.

Ralph Ellison – Invisible Man – book cover

Ralph Ellison, born in 1913, was a novelist, scholar, social and cultural critic, trumpet player, sculptor, and photographer. His novel Invisible Man, published in 1953, is a densely layered modernist narrative that resists all fixed interpretation. A poll of 200 literary critics in 1967 found it to be the greatest novel written by an American since the end of WW2. References to African-American folk tales and traditions coexist with influences from such works as T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland,” the first reading of which was, according to Ellison, a “moment of awakening.” In his psyche, James Joyce shared a table at a bar with Charlie Parker. During the 1930s, Ellison had been a fellow traveller of the Communist party, but, unlike the majority of writers with whom he had been associated at that time, he never defined himself as a “social realist.” This youthful experiment with ideological excess left him with a deep skepticism about purely intellectual systems of belief; direct action, to be effective, should be motivated by the call to shared sacrifice, a willingness to speak truth to power.1In a famous argument, when Hannah Arendt criticized black parents for endangering their children by sending them off on Freedom Rides, he counseled against false caution, and he pointed her toward the long tradition of African-American resistance, in which even the most modest of gains had been purchased at great cost. Arendt later apologized. In his view, however, people’s animosities were as tangled as their affinities. No dialectic would mechanically unfold, nor could an ideology mandate progress. Rather than being the predictable result of four centuries of institutionalized violence and injustice, he argued that “much in Negro life remains a mystery.” An intricate web connected things, such that African-American culture defined mainstream U.S. culture as much as it was defined by it. For Ellison, liberation was, of necessity, a matter of personal development, vision, discipline, and virtue. The Invisible Man is invisible not only because his true nature goes unrecognized by society at large but also because so much of his life takes place at a great depth.

Leroi Jones [Amiri Baraka] – Blues People – book cover

Amiri Baraka, born LeRoi Jones in 1934, was a poet, playwright, cultural and music critic, and social activist, for whom poetry was a weapon. He believed that any metaphorical revolt should be followed, in due course, by a physical one. In 1954, after being discharged from the US Air Force for possession of communist literature, he moved to Greenwich Village, where he met many avant-garde poets and developed a passion for blues and jazz. Totem Press, which he co-founded with his first wife Hettie Cohen, published Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and a number of other Beat writers. Like Ginsberg, Baraka was a seminal figure in the formation of the 1960s counterculture, and much of his writing shares the explosive, open-ended energy of this period. Somewhat ironically, perhaps, but in keeping with the root meaning of “revolution,” the way forward over the barricades led in a complex curve back to Africa. Baraka was a founder or co-founder of a number of organizations, including the New York Poets Theatre, the Black Arts Repertory Theatre and School, and the Spirit House Players, the last two of which performed edgy, confrontational, socially-engaged works, focusing on such topics as police brutality. If his call to arms did not lead to the revolution he expected, and instead to that of Reagan, his ritual gestures again speak to the violence of the moment. Baraka is credited with having helped to close the gap between written and oral literature, and he is seen as the direct predecessor of both Spoken Word and Rap.

The opposition of Ellison to Baraka is almost too perfect in its symmetry, as if it had been engineered to illustrate some sociopolitical theory. If only the two writers had been able to actually meet or correspond or debate in public forums, each might have served as a valuable catalyst for the other. A space might have opened up beyond what might be seen as a ritualized Oedipal conflict. In this space, Baraka might have shared with Ellison some portion of his experimental energy and Ellison might have shared with Baraka some portion of his subtlety, his sense of the irreducible complexity of the world.

In 1958, when Baraka was still LeRoi Jones, he did make several attempts to reach out to the older writer, whom he then admired. He wrote to Ellison, praising his two essays on jazz, and shortly afterward sent him a copy of Yugen, a Beat magazine that he was editing. For whatever reason, Ellison did not respond. After this, a good number of years went by during which they did not comment publicly on each other’s work. Then, in his 1964 review of Baraka’s (then still Jones’s) Blues People, Ellison wrote, among other things, that Jones’s “scholarly analysis frequently shatters into the dissonance of accusation,” and also that “The tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give the blues the blues.” One would think that such sharp words would have been enough to prompt a counterattack or a defense of aesthetic principles, but Baraka did not choose to respond. In his 1965 essay “LeRoi Jones Talking,” however, he wrote that Ellison’s fate in American letters was “a cautionary tale, that of a black man isolated and enshrined in the lily-white academy and unable to generate more significant writing.” Sadly, the distance between the two writers was too rigid and too great.

Romare Bearden, Train Whistle Blues, 1979

Romare Bearden, Train Whistle Blues, 1979

In their debate at the Hiphop Archive and Research Institute, Greg Tate and Greg Thomas have attempted to correct history by staging an exchange of perspectives as it could and perhaps should have occurred. In their re-imagination of the Ellison/Baraka opposition, direct challenges alternate with playful taunts. These exchanges have the energy of a competition but the warmth and generosity of a collaboration. Such a paradoxical tension is perhaps similar to what happens in a jazz group, where the players must constantly push each other to take risks, if not to the breaking point, and where they must somehow be both competitive and telepathically attuned. Jazz trumpeter and critic Steve Provizer told me once, “People always underestimate the athletic side to jazz. The traditional attitude is ‘Prove what you can do or get the hell off the stage.’” In these debates, Greg Thomas and Greg Tate do indeed prove that they are virtuosos of the affectionate provocation, the anti-gravitational riff, and the context-shifting aside.

Notes

Notes
↑1 In a famous argument, when Hannah Arendt criticized black parents for endangering their children by sending them off on Freedom Rides, he counseled against false caution, and he pointed her toward the long tradition of African-American resistance, in which even the most modest of gains had been purchased at great cost. Arendt later apologized.

The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part Two

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The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part Two

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Features Fiction, Story
Brian George, Monkey on the Lightning Tree, photogram, 2002 (detail)
Brian George, Monkey on the Lightning Tree, photogram, 2002 (detail)
Editor’s Note: The following is Part Two of a two-part essay. Read Part One here.
Brian George, Monkey on the Lightning Tree, photogram, 2002

Brian George, Monkey on the Lightning Tree, photogram, 2002

“The Proteus who sleeps inside us has opened his eyes. And we say what must be said. These jolts are for us what snares and tortures were to the sea-green prophet.”—Giorgio de Chirico

~∞~

If we are a storehouse for the “seeds of every form and the sprouts of every sort of life,” as Pico della Mirandola argues, who knows but that we might not scare ourselves? “The New Man is living amongst us now!” said Hitler, “He is here! Isn’t that enough for you? I will tell you a secret. I have seen the New Man. He is intrepid and cruel. Even I was afraid of him.” Once, we were not so easily impressed. We had not yet volunteered to be eaten by the gods, they to whom we had recklessly given birth. We were not afraid of giants, who burned as brightly as atomic bombs, nor of tiny beings with large eyes, who were skilled at creating simulacra. Our craniums were large, and open at the top, but we did not necessarily need large bodies to go with them. One size fit all. It was endlessly interactive. Mercury had attached its power to our ankles. We did not need wings! Few realize that the oceans fill the footprints that we left, that megaliths mark the vast multitude of our navels, or that the sky is filled to overflowing with our tears.

Much stupider than they think, Earth’s top one percent are nonetheless quite adept at playing games. Let us posit: that they rule by reactivating some antediluvian trauma, the fear of which has been bred into our bones, the records about which have been hidden in the coils of junk DNA, which they, and they alone, have somehow learned to read. Such feats of micromanagement! All data is then made to correspond. Not being actual prophets, of course, their reading of these records is hit or miss at best. “As you are figuring out the world,” they say, “we will have manufactured a new one, and then another one after that!” This does not mean that they are actually in charge. Like us, they are subject to whatever spells they cast, and, as the apparatus of the Great Year turns, they are swept along with the other 99 percent. No part can ever be taken from the whole, nor does the One increase when added to itself. We move as One, unconsciously, and pushed forward from behind.

Brian George, Time-Spiral, 2003

Brian George, Time-Spiral, 2003

As we free ourselves from the common wisdom, paranoia may be the most immediate of temptations. All conspiracy theories may be true, or none of them, or a fact from this one and an archetype from that one, but in the end such labyrinthine explorations may not lead to greater freedom. The trap is this: that we are always the good guys, and someone else is always to blame for every evil in the world.

Appearances to the contrary, it is possible that the things that matter most are actually very simple. As citizens of the greater city of the cosmos, who have now been grounded, it is our job to remove the layers of obfuscation that cut each person from the core of his/her power, so that each may again serve as a kind of movable Omphalos. Gently but persistently, we must bring our attention back to what I will call the “Boy Scout (or Girl Scout) Code of Conduct,” as this was understood by the Ancients. The 21 “Anamnesian Maxims” that correspond to the seven “Anamnesian Virtues” are below. These are formatted as injunctions. To the extent that they can be interpreted at all, there are some that must be followed to the letter. There are others that might put the practitioner into conflict with the Authorities. In your cultivation of virtue, or “virtu,” if you go with the classical understanding of the word, you must read not only with your own eyes but also through the eyes of your opponent. You must read between the lines, as well as what is on them. Obey at your own risk. These 21 “Anamnesian Maxims” are as follows:

1) We must love to act well for the sake of acting well; all action is circular, and no Uroboros can remove the tail from its mouth.

2) We must work hard and stick to our projects through any and all obstacles, until, as if by magic, we one day finish what we started. Looking back, we must thank all of those forces that conspired to destroy us. We will have died more than a dozen times since we set forth from our blackened port. We must not be so naïve again.

3) We must learn how to accept the full responsibility for our actions, and be the first to gladly admit it when we are wrong. If we discover, as in a dream, that we have caused harm to the innocent, we must accuse those who have dared to point their fingers at us, for it is they who have tainted our otherwise spotless minds.

4) We must cultivate a smile, and be able to transmit warmth from the solar plexus. It is in this way that our energy will tempt space to self-organize. As much as does the sun, we will then be able to micromanage each event.

5) We must be willing to meet each person on their own terms, however self-deluded or sociopathic they might be. We will know that we have succeeded when their flaws become an almost exact mirror-image of our own. We must then kiss the horror that confronts us in the mirror.

6) We must be generous with our friends, but more generous with our enemies. We must hold them as close as Teddy bears. For they MUST be kept off balance. We must trust that our sense of style will make up for the catastrophic damage that we cause.

7) Putting fears aside, we must do our best to act with some appropriate degree of courage, which may mean standing still. We must practice death, as though our lives depended on it, and be willing, at any moment, to shrug off what we love.

8) We must speak honestly, to the extent that we can hide behind a mask.

9) We must keep to the Mean. We must do nothing in excess, except when we choose to violate this rule. This is part of the natural equilibrium of the Mean. Lacking excess, it would not know what it is, or how to tell its butt from its elbow.

10) We must act justly. We must treat others in the way that we would want them to treat us, especially when they deserve a good slap across the face, which, at the appropriate moment, we must know how to apply.

11) We must kill first and ask questions later, like the gods, so long as we have the best interests of our sacrifice at heart.

12) We must care for the orphan, and marry our brother’s widow. If needed, we must be willing to make love to our neighbor’s wife. Grave indeed are the responsibilities of the caretakers of the cosmos!

13) A window is open, and we must thank it. As was done “In Illo Tempore,” we must be able to zip from one place to another with no need to cross through the intervening distance, for this will reduce our dependence upon gas.

14) As blunt as need be, we must perfect what Hemingway called our “built-in bullshit detectors.” We must, if and when we choose, speak truth to power, or else operate beyond the edges of the stage. We must cultivate a sense of the innate law of the omniverse. It is utterly obscure. It is as soft as a breath.

15) We must boldly go where no man has gone before, at first together, then more and more alone. No other will survive the wreck. Once having washed ashore, you will there find Argos, your aged dog, who has been waiting with bated breath for your return. He is a good dog. He wants only to lick your hand before he dies. A loyal companion, he will even then share the deep intelligence of his nose. He will be waiting with his cold head resting on his paws, on the last dock, as the ocean swells.

16) To the one side Birds and to the other Snakes: Keep eyes wide open, but do not enter any contest where you would have to stare them down. Do not offend them with such words as “high” and “low,” for, already, they tend to regard you as a snack.

17) We must cultivate curiosity, for there would be no world without it.

18) We must stay alert, and have no fear of boredom. A wait of 12,000 years is not other than the blinking of an eye. We are not, in fact, obligated to bring new worlds into existence, however much we might like to pretend that this is so. No, for we are on a wheel. On this wheel, each of the spokes functions like the gallery of a museum, and, from where we stand, we are free to wander into and out of any period that we choose.

19) We must be able to bring objects across a threshold with us, whether gargoyle breastplates or stringed philosophical instruments, and then fully translate them into this world from our dreams. Do it well, and these objects will blend seamlessly with other props in the environment, although some few may note their faint radioactive glow.

20) We must be good little boys and girls—or else! But no, we are free to be as difficult and subversive as we want, so long as we keep the Bindu always before our eyes and the apparatus of our primal energy intact.

21) We must cultivate the ability to break through any mirror, leaving, as we go, little evidence of our passing. Moving in and out from behind the surface of projection, we must snatch the archaeological relics that we need.

These seven virtues and 21 maxims will allow us to stay grounded as we venture to reconstruct the non-dual architecture of the city, which exists in no one place. For observe, my wide-eyed shipmates, there is no such thing as time, and the lightning bolt that directs us falls crazily where it will. The emptiness that is space shows no sign of disturbance. We cannot leave, for we never did exist, and, in flashes, it now seems that the whole world is transparent. This transparency then continues to open up and spread, period after period, world after world.

Once, the Kundalini hid its teachings inside forms, as a test of whose skill in camouflage they served, and from whose potency they had been created. We must later on help to free these teachings from their forms. They are subtle. They may make no sense. We must harmonize the scalar energy that spills from the HAARP technology of the Everyday Object. We must break the Sumerian seal that prevents us from speaking with our own reflections in the mirror.

Having once been set in motion, the Kundalini stirs up and expels a volcanic flux of images, as it burns through every obstacle in its path. It rips continents like sheets of paper. It dismantles the prosthetic bodies of the gods. It unravels all of the complexes that defend us from our fears, leaving no means by which blessing can be sorted from disaster. It expunges every trace of the antediluvian records, all arts and sciences, yet without even a small detail being lost. “But why is this necessary?” you might justifiably ask. It is possible that it does things just to show us that it can. It is possible that the Kundalini simply likes to play. Or, alternately, it is possible that our childhood is over, and that, finding ourselves cold and naked on the coast of a dead ocean, we must figure out how to grow up. Said Tertullian, “I believe in the Resurrection BECAUSE it is impossible.” So too, at the tail-end of the Kali Yuga, if access to our first mode of vision would now seem to us impossible, it is for this reason that we must treat our abandonment as a test. It is possible that good vision depends on our having nothing much left to lose. For there is no place that does not see into your bones, your muscles, and your nerves. Of limitation the master, perhaps this is the reason that you have allowed yourself to be blind.

At some point, cooling down, upon finding that there are no laws left to violate, the Kundalini may become much nicer than it was. Then as smoothly as a bell tone through the zodiac or as the arcing of a current through the ocean, it will move on to its predetermined end. Each atom will have 108 eyes.

We do not always have to be picked up and transported to view one dimension from the vantage point of another. A state of clarity will sometimes do the trick. Bypassing the need for hallucinatory display, we can glimpse just how the dimensions fit together, and why they interact as they do. If we desire to reset the parameters of our vision, it will be necessary to begin at the beginning, like those long-eared poets who lifted up dead cities with their words. Joining hands, they danced upon black waters. Withdrawing to their austerities, they each embodied the previous holders of the lineage. They felt no need to speak. When they did speak, what was hidden became clear. Like them, we must not only find a way to begin at the beginning, we must determine just what a “beginning” is.

Brian George, Coiled Snake, 1992

Brian George, Coiled Snake, 1992

The world is almost infinitely complex, as is time, and human nature, but we should start by drawing a circle on the ground; we should place our feet at the center of a turning 10-dimensional torus, which can be statistically renormalized as a circle no more than 10 feet wide. There, we will begin our invocation. It should be there, in this circle, and not elsewhere, for there is no other space. This circle will be powered by our breath, and its centripetal vortex will then gather up what it needs. Visions will be allowed to visit, but fears and traumas and hatreds and projections will be required stand a few feet off. A standing wave will lead us to the center of the sun, inside of which are cities. Back home, at the edges of the circle, we will find that our bioenergetic vehicles have been transformed into stones. At first worshipped by the masses, they will later come to be seen as normal parts of the environment. In passing, we will note that a day takes 24,000 years. Hieroglyphs buzzing in geometric networks will spontaneously rearrange themselves. The earliest strata of creation will no longer be above us, but rather somewhere closer at hand. Rooted in the philosophical silence of our stones, which do but do not resemble us, we will traverse the disfigured wonders of the landscape. We will gather what we need, no more and no less. We will improvise as we go. Thus will we “walk on the ruins of a vast sky,” as Yves Bonnefoy said.

We must start from where we are, and trust in our own direct powers of perception. If we know, with close to 100 percent certainty, that there will be earthquakes in an earthquake zone, then we will know that this is not the ideal place to build a chain of nuclear power plants. We will laugh as we stare in wonderment at the expert who would be so rude as to disagree! If we know that all reserves of oil are going to give out in our lifetimes, whereupon our way of life will stop, then we had best make haste to reduce our carbon footprint. We should do this not in order to be politically correct but rather to strike a blow against the tyranny of the object. If we fear that, for purposes of GPS surveillance, we may one day be implanted with a microchip, then we had best soon rediscover how to come and go from our bodies. If Monsanto has insured the triumph of genetically modified Frankenfoods, then it might be best to think small: a few out-of-date seeds could be planted in the yard. With some luck, we will figure out how to farm before the last of the trucks stop running. At the end of a night of purgatory in a pup tent, we must prostrate ourselves before the pure light of the Ur-Plant. We must beg it to expound upon the occult depths of green, as well as on why our shoots are just barely coming up. It is important that we push beyond our embarrassment to ask. We will, ideally, have no use for assault weapons. Instead, we will share a good meal with our neighbors. Joyously simple, and on our backs carrying the sum of our experience, like the weight of the whole world, we must dare to be as naked as at the moment of our births.

Brian George, Key Figure, 2004

Brian George, Key Figure, 2004

We must access, without moving, all of the records that we need, and with our small flutes challenge the bone orchestra of the empire.

In the end, it is predictable that any prophesy will fail, for the omniverse is far more contradictory than a clock, and, although we can envision it as a being with two hands, it is in no way obligated to use only the hands that we can see. Then too, of necessity, some chaos must always be added to the mix. In order to get from where we are to the sphere that we once inhabited, we must set foot on a path that does not exist, and in bodies that have not yet been created. There is no door to the Macrocosm. Again, we must find the key.

The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part One

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The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer / Part One

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Features Fiction, Story culture, tech
Brian George, Seed City, photogram, 2002
Brian George, Seed City, photogram, 2002
Editor’s Note: The following is Part One of a two-part essay. Read Part Two here.
Brian George, Seed City, photogram, 2002

Brian George, Seed City, photogram, 2002

“And, spread across solemn distances, your smile entered my heart.”—Rainer Maria Rilke

~∞~

In a comment on my essay “The Vanguard of a Perpetual Revolution,” Okantomi wrote, “I often feel like I can see what is happening in the world, as well as what is just about to happen, and what will almost certainly happen later on, and it’s like no one else sees what I am seeing. It’s eerie, shocking, and finally depressing.” People do have visions of the future, both individually and collectively. Quite often, these visions are troubling, but few bother to follow the implications of their vision to the end, let alone change their lives. One way or another, though, our visions have ways of making themselves felt, even if we do not register what it is we are seeing. The world is a kind of eyeball. There is no such thing as a “safe space.”

Such visions do not necessarily depend upon telepathy; they can be equally present in the automated workings of the culture, in the demographic analyses that drive the decisions of corporate boards. Hollywood blockbusters, for example—such as Star Wars, The Fountain, The Terminator, Blade Runner, Total Recall, Planet of the Apes, Avatar (and all of their various spinoffs)—strike me as a potent vehicles for contemporary mythmaking, whatever their variations in quality, whatever the motives or self-awareness of their directors. There are cues. There are occult knots. Our responses are overdetermined. Our hands freeze in mid-air as they reach for their absent weapons. Our lips form the first vowels of a chant that will atomize a whole city. As we stare into the distance, the ancient world resurfaces as a technological dream on the horizon. We remember the collapse of complex systems, the hierarchical clash between the rulers and the ruled, but we mix and match the specifics of the story. Our best efforts to solidify the Rorschach blot of the future only point us towards the enigma of our origins. To discover what we know, we must sometimes pause to observe what we create. Seized from afar, as by the magnetism of an almost nonexistent teacher, we are pulled by a current all too eager to instruct us. An unresolved agenda speaks to us from the screen. The screen also acts like an iron curtain, through which the bodies of the living may not pass.

Or, in a different mode, people give form to the future through their fears, by what they do not do as much as what they do, by their belle indifference when presented with a series of ultimatums. Our psyches are jagged. Whole periods have gone missing. As crises converge, our refusal to act is a testament to the scale of the coming upheaval. We finger the rigid outlines of our scars, as if they belonged to someone else. We shape the future by our under-the-skin sense of all of those things we know but go out of our way not to think about: that reserves of oil will almost certainly run out in our lifetimes, that the U.S. doesn’t manufacture much of anything anymore, and that there is not enough locally grown food to sustain most cities in a real emergency. There are many things that it seems better not to know. The future is one of the better places in which to store such unasked for knowledge.

It is always possible that the march of progress will indefinitely continue, that “someone will think of something,” that our way of life will require only a few small modifications, that windmills and solar cells will save us. As ancient souls, we know this is absurd. The problem is, of course, to separate and categorize these alternate versions of the future—in simplistic terms, to discriminate between the more false than true and the more true than false. We can see the details but somehow miss the pattern; we can see the pattern but somehow miss the details. To see clearly we must see from more than one location, from all of the 360 degrees of a circle, and then out beyond the 28 U-Turns of a labyrinth, there to access the ten-dimensional records of a sphere.

Brian George, Star-Bird, drawing, 1990

Brian George, Star-Bird, drawing, 1990

Sadly, there are laws that prevent our switching out of “power save” in order to reactivate the full scope of our senses. The art of remote viewing is no longer taught in schools. Bilocation is now seen as unscientific. There are industries devoted to the proposition that a human being has less predictive power than an algorithm. The age of the tool has passed and the age of the prosthesis is at hand. We see what is put before us; we do not see the long shadows that are standing behind our backs. We now see with our eyes; we do not believe that it is possible to see with the solar plexus. From their underground bases, speeding all ways at once, like boomerangs, and with superhuman stealth, suspect forces play games with the horizon. Fear and hope pump out a kind of metaphysical fog, crackling with static, which makes every level of the process difficult and tests our ability to translate the first hieroglyphs that we wrote.

As light can manifest as either a particle or a wave, or both, but not at the same time, so too the future both IS and IS NOT there. It is there for those beings with a panoramic view, as it is for us at the moment of our deaths, but it revolts against all functions that we would force it to perform. It is present in those flashes that it chooses to transmit; it does not see fit to instruct us as to the gaps in our methodology, through which we will fall. We want to believe that our systems are moving each year a bit closer to perfection. How accurate this is! Yet we forget that “what is perfect will soon end,” as it says in the Tao Te Ching. The language spoken by the future both IS and IS NOT similar to that spoken by the present. Floods of information are provided, yes, enough to create the appearance of a world, but too often disinformation is more attractive than the truth. Trolls and gremlins are among us! Fear forces us to misjudge the location of our navels. We dread the constant vigilance that is imposed by the Ideal.

Through the years, and especially in the early 1990s, I have sometimes found myself projected into the future, both in terms of specific images and through wider visionary overviews. These experiences felt urgent. They also, to some extent, seemed almost pointless to report. Before an event, few would have any reason to pay attention to such images, and afterwards, reading poetry would be way down on the public’s list of priorities. I was able to see certain details as well as certain patterns; at first, there was no good way to present these as a narrative, any more than an ocean consists of a series of steps. If steps existed, they were miles down. How is it possible to tell the story of an ocean? The traumas that had possessed us from the time of the Younger Dryas were nonetheless starting to make sense. A finger to my lips, I have spent years keeping secrets. I pretend, when asked, to know much more about football than I do.

In retrospect, certain passages stand out, as having started in one world and then ended up in another. What began as vision had some tangential relationship to fact. For example, references to the destruction of the World Trade Towers popped up five or six times in poems from 1992. “A monster stalked his head through the air vents of the World Trade Towers. He could not find it, for the towers themselves had disappeared.” “The World Trade Towers for a fourth time fall; their shadows stand.” There were other lines from this period that possibly pointed to the BP Gulf oil disaster: “Not one leaf stirs. The sea has met its death by accident. The tree Yggdrasil has been hacked at the root.” And to Fukushima: “You have thrown a wave at the reactors of the Nephilim. Rods overheat, and the whole of the ocean is not enough to cool them.” From the standpoint of vision, what was real was that our way of life was far more fragile than we thought. The complexity of our systems was a liability rather than a defense, and, the more complex they became, the more out of touch and vulnerable we were. What we called “facts” were a way of keeping our eyes fixed on the foreground.

There were dozens of references in my books To Akasha: An Incantation for the End of History and The Preexistent Race Descends to the idea of a “mile-high wave.” To Akasha was structured around this image, and it was a phrase that I never expected to hear in the evening news. But, during the BP Gulf oil crisis, reporters began to speak about what would happen if the vast lakes of methane under the Gulf were to explode. One consequence of this would be a mile-high wave that would rise up to wash over two thirds of North America.

On a day to day level, I might sometimes prefer not to focus on such things. In this, I am no different than the great majority of my race. Signs do not always wait for us to notice them, however, nor do they necessarily take an esoteric form.

December 21st, 2012, was a date that left many prophets disappointed, yet it was on this date that Warner Bros. released a movie called The Impossible. Based on actual events, it tells the story of an English family on vacation at a resort in Khao Lak, Thailand, who were separated when the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 struck. After a movie-length ordeal, they are once again reunited. This was the tsunami that killed 230,000 people and displaced 1.7 million more. Many critics gave it positive reviews. Eric Koln, of Indie Wire, on the other hand, gave it only a B-minus grade. He argued that it suffered from a “feel-good” plot within the context of mass-destruction. Already anxious, I had no desire to see or judge the movie for myself. Waves haunt me, as they have for the past 12,000 or so years, and this one seemed just a local instance of far greater things to come. For me, the Paleolithic glaciers are still just about to melt, and a rise in sea-level will destroy the cities on most coasts.

But why, you may ask, do so many of our predictions turn out to be wrong? Now that 2012 has come and gone, and the visions of its cultic devotees have proven far less than accurate, this issue may be a big one, whose repercussions are only now just beginning to be felt.

It is not that we do not know, perhaps, but rather that there is no way to determine what we know, or to differentiate a corporate logo from a hieroglyph. We see, but we have forgotten how to read. We believe that our minds penetrate beyond the ends of our own noses, when, in fact, they rarely penetrate that far.

Brian George, Bird Arising out of Snake Arising out of Pot, drawing, 2002

Brian George, Bird Arising out of Snake Arising out of Pot, drawing, 2002

If we humans cannot travel from one side of the omniverse to the other, it is perhaps because, at this point in the Kali Yuga, we have gotten much too big. In the Satya Yuga, when the sun still had a face, we knew enough to avoid getting tripped by our own feet. We could enter through the keyhole of the pineal gland to then exit onto the pyre that the Birds had built to burn us, where, as we watched with bland amusement, our bones would turn to ash. Our 10,000-year life-spans allowed for much experimentation.

We inhabited our bodies from the outside in, like the visitors to a museum—the Smithsonian Institution, let’s say—and not, as in the present, from the inside out. The bright tunnel that leads to the edge of the known world, and the aperture that opens out of Life and onto Death, to some can seem as frightening as a kind of demonic kaleidoscope, which, ignoring the instruction manuals that were left to us by the Ancients, they now wait for 70 years to touch. Then again, on the other side of the aperture, we may draw to ourselves beings who are adept at playing games, and who are quick to realize that our skill-set has grown rusty. We may inadvertently have traveled with big targets on our backs.

It is certainly odd: that even though some part of ourselves may be living in the future, our predictions are far more likely to be wrong than to be right. As Okantomi suggests, prophesy may have less to do with the prediction of the future than with the ability to see clearly into the present—to boldly recognize patterns that are just beginning to be formed or to probe into patterns that have long been in existence, but which, for whatever reason, have not yet become visible.

For the most part, this involves a set of classical virtues rather than a bag of supernatural powers. Let me translate these as the “Anamnesian Virtues.” These are real virtues, however much they have been formatted by an artificial author. To the extent that they remain on this side of the existent, we must acknowledge that they are fragments from a long since vanished text, which was copied and then recopied into half a dozen languages before once again being lost. Tibetans would refer to such a text as a “terma,” a “hidden treasure,” whose contents could only be deciphered by a “terton.” Such a text is obviously prone to mistranslation, if not self-serving paraphrase; so too, perhaps, with these “Anamnesian Virtues.” These virtues are coupled with another 21 “Anamnesian Maxims.” I will speak of these later on. But first, let us look at the seven virtues. These are as follows:

1) Detachment: the capacity to see the ocean that will swallow up all things, and to listen as it whispers in your ear. You should, paradoxically, become even more empathic as the degree of your detachment grows. You may act on this, or not. You may spill your blood as a purely symbolic gesture, in service to those humans yet unborn. You may feel the pain of the multitudes that you kill.

2) Foresight: the capacity, while still in love with life, to be dead, and productively so. So too, the longer you are dead the more alive you will be.

3) Self-reliance: the capacity to stand on your own as you free yourself from the force-fields of the common wisdom, and then not complain too much. This will be more of a challenge if your head, hands, heart, and feet have been removed. Most prostheses will require some amount of training, after which you will become 100 percent free.

4) Balance: the capacity to see the right in every wrong, as well as the wrong at the dead center of each right. By the blinding light of the hypersphere, we can see that even the most generous of our actions is a crime; at one and the same moment, every crime can be regarded as a type of revolutionary act, as a flawed but useful reinvention of the law. Strange indeed are the methods of the stern Goddess of Necessity!

5) Hindsight: the capacity to remember just when to shut up, and the knowledge that you have seen these things a great many times before. To all others has a role and a position been assigned; to the seer, only the pathos of descent.

6) Stealth: the capacity to bring your full energy to a project when there are few who understand what you are doing, and none who will reward you. Only in this way will the dead be prompted to grant access to their libraries.

7) Simplicity: the capacity to make do with whatever Fate deposits. We must do what we were meant to do. We must go where we are meant to go. The shortest distance between two points, however, may turn out to be a labyrinth. We must read each accident as a catalytic cue in order to discover the true outlines of our work.

As Lincoln said in his 1862 Annual Message to Congress, “We must disenthrall ourselves.” These are the key virtues that will help us to develop the breadth of vision that we need. They are of use to both the solitary artist and the multitude. No line divides the subject from the object. “One thought fills immensity,” as Blake argues in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Even good habits must be probed and then, finally, dismantled. All crutches must be thrown away, as you free yourself from the advice of experts, from the urge to see your side win and the other side destroyed, and from the high-tech wet-dreams each day generated by the media. At the end, there should be nothing left but space.

Brian George, Sky-Net, drawing, 2004

Brian George, Sky-Net, drawing, 2004

Conversely, you must have the courage to accept that you do not, in fact, create your own reality. For the “You” is inextricably bound to the experience of the “We.” The “Body Politic” is an actual body, however much we might choose to view it as a metaphor. You are one of 6 ½ billion being swept along through the veins of a metastasizing empire, whose reach is interdimensional in its scope, but whose key principle, at the moment, is nowhere to be found. Its search engines troll for evidence that it has not ceased to exist, as there, just up ahead, the ghosts of failed super-beings beckon from the fallout.

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