The Explained

It is my solemn duty to present a list of books to do with altered, and altering, perceptions. It's traditional, when writing about this subject, to list books you'd like people to know you've read.

Take this quick-ish route to join in the fun: Hamlet's Mill, Passport to Magonia, On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Valis. The first two are grand, and accessible, works spanning all antiquity and myth. The latter two are contextual and exemplar texts on how real the self is.

Please do tell me which ones I've missed, and I'll tell you why I've not included them. Well-known titles could be omitted, but browsing around from known to unknown is much of the fun.

All titles are, at the time of writing, available at The Internet Archive, except * - and you can create a free account there, to borrow some of these and browse more. If you can spare it, please drop 'em a $ to keep it happening.

Adams, Douglas. 1979. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Arendt, Hannah. 1951. The Origins of Totalitarianism.
ABible, The. 1611. (King James Version including apocrypha).
Bramley, William. 1993. The Gods of Eden.*
Bowart, Walter H. 1978. Operation Mind Control.
Carroll, Lewis. 1862. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
de Santillana, Giorgio & Hertha von Dechend. 1969. Hamlet's Mill: An Essay Investigating the Origins of Human Knowledge and its Transmission Through Myth.
David-Neel, Alexandra. 1929. Magic and Mystery in Tibet.
Dick, PK. 1963. The Man in the High Castle.
Dick, PK. 1981. Valis.
Dr. Seuss. 1957. The Cat in the Hat.
Eliot, TS. 1922. The Waste Land.
Epic of Gilgamesh, The.
Forsyth, Frederick. 1971. The Day of the Jackal.
Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer
Grahame, Kenneth. 1908. Wind in the Willows.
Hall, Manly P. 1928. The Secret Teachings of All Ages.
Hancock, Graham. 1995. Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth's Lost Civilization.
Hebdige, Dick. 1979. Subculture: The Meaning of Style.
Heinlein, Robert A. 1961. Stranger in a Strange Land.
Hunkin, Tim. 1990. Almost Everything There is to Know.*
Huxley, Aldous. 1932. Brave New World.
Icke, David. 1996. I am me, I am free: The Robot's Guide to Freedom.
Koestler, Arthur. 1972. The Roots of Coincidence.
Lear, Edward. 1846. The Book of Nonsense.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1968. A Wizard of Earthsea.*
Lovecraft, HP. 1936. At the Mountains of Madness.
Mack, Lorrie; Harwood, Eric & Riley, Lesley (eds). 1984. The Unexplained.*
Mackay, Charles. 1852. Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
Moore, Alan. 1982-88. V for Vendetta.
Orwell, G. 1948. 1984.
Sanderson, Ivan. 1974. Uninvited Visitors.
Sitchin, Zecharia. 1976. The 12th Planet.*
Vallée, Jacques. 1969. Passport to Magonia: from Folklore to Flying Saucers.
Upanishads.
Vonnegut Jr., Kurt. 1969. Slaughterhouse-Five.
Watts, Alan. 1969. The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.
Webb, James. 1974. The Occult Underground.
Williamson, George Hunt. 1974. Secret Places of the Lion: Mysteries of Time & Space.
Wilson, Colin. 1971. The Occult.
Shea, Robert & Wilson, Robert Anton. 1975. The Illuminatus! Trilogy.

Long modernism and the exponential unknown

Alexandra David-Néel, dragged up in Tibetan gear

 

 

 

 

“The belief in psychic phenomena, in miracles and in magic is as alive in our days as it was in the Middle Ages. What we have gained is the freedom to speak of these things and to attempt the experience of them without having to fear the stakes of the Inquisition.”

In her brief preface to the 1965 edition of Magic and Mystery in Tibet, Alexandra David-Néel summarises succinctly the longest-lasting and lowest-valued effect of modernism: freedom to experience and to speak about the mysterious, the unknown, the unexplainable.  

Explainers and documenters of ineffable mysteries, from Blavatsky to David-Néel, from Colin Wilson to Bruce Duensing — and countless others, before, during and after — have assayed altered perceptions and acuity of human awareness of the unknown and catalogued its materialisation in mysterious expressions.

Inspired by keen intellects, compendiasts and enthusiasts foraged, gathered and syncretized, producing mélanges of knowledge-at-the margins, particularly relating to the occult. The modernist syncretic strand tracing hidden and lost knowledge, developed during the past 150 years from the monolithic occult, has been re-constructed into separate, often discrete, fields of knowledge. A reader browsing mysteries now finds references to parapsychology, paranormality, spirituality, alternate and hidden histories, lost knowledges and alternative lifestyles, magic, miracles and demonology. And UFOs. And ghosts. Maybe angels, too, if you like.

By the 1970s, a kind of journalism noir of self-narrated research quests, literature reviews and comparative studies mediated an aggregated body of knowledge on the mysterious unknown. At the same time, academic studies of the unknown were starting to flourish in parallel with US government research on parapsychology, and other subjects.

In the 1990s there had never been so much unknown, and so much of the unexplained explained, and so much more of it under investigation, and so little known about it. At that time it was still possible for a person with an interest in the unknown to claim that they knew as much as there was to know about it.

The examples, the feelings, the objects, the repetitions, the similarities. Listing the unknowns and their attributes is not nothing. The greater work is in finding ways to communicate understanding that the search will likely reveal no final state, and that the first good results will come from recognising that human responses are real. Even responses to ineffable unknowns.  

Dean Radin has shown that responses to and effects of particular experiences can be measured using scientific methodology, whether these responses and effects are regarded as improbable and/or replicable.

In the matter of the unknown, in everyday settings where unknowns are most often responded to, quality of questioning has yet to catch up with free expression of experience. Our responses to stimuli may be entirely predictable, if not entirely rational. But not questioning equates to not imagining, which is both impossible and undesirable.

Steps to take in exercising freedoms to talk about the unknown include: determining functions of ‘unpredictable’; measuring products of material responses to indiscernible, unidentifiable, unknown stimuli; realising and measuring unknown stimuli; analysing discursive, linguistic and aesthetic aspects of both responses to unknown stimuli and the subjects of responses.

Image: Preus Museum, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

Blue Men #2

Ancient Brittanic warrior, presumably prior to being woaded

Brief notes on blue people context in contemporary culture and history.

Dr Manhattan (Watchmen, Alan Moore, 1986-87), is far from being a fully disinterested observer. He uses his simultaneous-being to analyse the universal clockwork, in which he too is enmeshed, and as the only witness to totality judges Homo sapiens, sentencing them to extinction.

In Avatar (James Cameron, 2009) a blue-bodied hominid species attempts coexistence with and then fights for survival against an invading force of humans. During intense, brief conflict Pandorans - all species combining forces - prevail over Homo sapiens and prevent completion of genocidal planetary degradation. 

Avatar is an inverted blue man tale, figuring Homo sapiens subjects who are non-homogenous, at least in ideation, witnessing Pandorans’ distress (having first caused it)

Ancient Britons' camouflage, using a gray-blue woad suspension as a disguise, was much like contemporary military camouflage paint, allowing its users to remain only partially observable, whether perceived. As described by Manda Scott in her Boudicca adventure novels, woad-dressed men and women played the war game of seeing without being seen, both witnessing and attacking from shadows and environmental cover. It is not written that Iceni or other Brittanic warriors disguised themselves in tribute to, or as inspired by, non-human blue people known to be witnesses to turbid emotions and altered states.

It would be impertinent to interpolate opinion on woad as body paint, using only Julius Caesar's text as a source. Similarly, it is presumptuous to assume homogeneity, origins or intent of blue men.

But we may speculate. Perhaps blue men emerge briefly, camouflauged as blue men, to mime, empathically, sympathetically or sarcastically, our psychically loud, resonant emotional responses to distress.

 

Blue men #1

 

George Cruickshank, Blue Devils, 1835

The colour blue is often assigned to sadness in lands acculturated as European. This hue was not chosen arbitrarily from the visible spectrum. Blue is the colour of figures described accompanying delirium tremens and melancholy.

Early 19th century poet John Clare glimpsed blue men while walking near Maxey, a watery spot between Helpston and Market Deeping. Clare was a drinker, although he doesn’t say whether he was drunk at the time.

Sometime between the early and late 1800s, blue devils became the blues.

In the early 1980s, a school friend related a dream-state vision after a heavy weekend’s drinking. Unsure whether he was awake, he was both delighted and alarmed by a little blue man dancing above his feet. 

Neither my friend nor Clare perceived intent in these apparitions.

Blue men appear as impartial observers, witnesses, supernatural first responders. These witnesses to distress seem unconnected to its causes. They are players of separation or detachment in our performance of processing, as we respond to particularly keen experiences of emotional resonance. Generically specific figures of empathy with ourselves, accompanying and heralding our own witnessing and protection of ourselves at our most open and vulnerable.

The plain irrationality, explicable separation and supernatural detachment of blue men figure them as disinterested observers beyond intent. 

 

East Anglian Heights

After reading Daniel Defoe’s Tour of the Eastern Counties of England, I decided to write a linear tour, sliding down the East Anglian Heights. Itinerary: Luton street food vans -> King John’s treasure.

Gordon Home imagined inserting himself into modernity that way, Through the Chilterns to the Fens. This is an impossible route, of course: the Heights mark the westernmost extent of historical East Anglia, veering round the edge of the historical Fens.

I stood on the spot. Narrated wonders forgotten by libraries, un-rediscovered even by freelance travel journalists. Wonders out of which God, on appeal, might compile a wünderkammer or terrarium for me to tramp after life.

Whittling down subjectivities research angles got ever more oblique. And they proliferated and curation sickness got me. It went to poetic wording.

It’s not easy getting back in once you’re out. It’s even harder when you weren’t there in the first place. Raymond Williams fantasised long and hard, under great imagined pain, about how great it would be if the Labour Party were actually Marxist.

The wettest place in England now the driest, with Osiris-finding frisson such a real fiction that people exposed in floodground newbuilds will care to worry only through eventual narratives currently in pre-production.

Summer light renders the land us, and our cultures down to dribbling subsistence. Repeatable, repeating, comfortable as egg.

Instead of making something about thinking, I enjoyed the thinking for the time being, which is sometimes sufficient action.

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Further reading:

map showing effects of water level increase of 1m above high tide [coastal.climatecentral.org]

Defoe, Daniel. Tour of the Eastern Counties of England. 1722.

Home, Gordon. Through the Chilterns to the Fens. JM Dent & Sons. 1925.

Roxby, RM. 'Historical geography of East Anglia: II. The configuration and chief soil regions'. The Geographical Teacher. Vol. 5, No. 3 (Autumn, 1909), pp. 128-144.

 

 

The Chorleywood process - Поехали!

 

"Vanessa Holloway & Andrew Whitley" by Real Bread Campaign is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.    

 

Sapiens Sapiens, settled in and propagated for its easily accessible, harvestable yeast secretions. Buoyed up, propelled, cultivated by funguses, Sapiens Sapiens grows in networks of inescapable lifelong psychoses, in which objects, ideas and experiences precede, supersede, adumbrate, whittle, and carve being. Ideal structures narrate material network flows, which are consciousness and, at the other end of the material-visible durational spell, territories of happy food units.

Yeast, the most loveable edible domestic fungus.

Yeast hosts with invisible structures erupting out of the tops of their heads, trailing through space-time, stretching out to unknowns, unseens, unfelts. Imaginary fungal spires. All structures created and maintained to ensure proliferation, rising, and atmospheric breakout.

1961.

The year of the Chorleywood process. The year of Gagarin.

HP Lovecraft's Jukebox - Part 4

 Imaginary disc

 

Jukebox content

I had a whole load of words compiled and ready to go on the subjects / contexts of the wax cylinders loaded into HP Lovecraft's jukebox. It's very good writing, chock full of keen observations, connections and insights, not a word wasted.

Then I started reading Paul Morley's A Sound Mind (2020) and decided against giving it to you.

If you want to test the very idea for yourself, listen to one or two of the cylindrical recordings that may have washed the deep past into the shallows of the present for young Lovecraft.

Listening will brings us closer, if not nearer.

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The final part, soon, is about the music of horror written into Lovecraft's stories.