On a Few of the Many Varieties of Codes and Deceptive Behaviors in History

Buckminster Fuller writes about the earliest Polynesian navigators, who were wizards who learned to sail East to West against the winds, with secret knowledge that was only shared orally with their sons, or coded in their chants: 

"Knowing all about boats/These navigator priests were the only people/Who knew that the Earth was spherical,/That the Earth is a closed system/With its myriad resources chartable./But being water people,/They kept their charts in their heads/And relayed the information/To their navigator progeny/Exclusively in esoterical,/Legendary, symbolical codings/Embroidered into their chants."- Synergetics, pp.749-751

I see this as an example of a small group who protect their knowledge because it was powerful and probably because it was thrilling for small-group cohesion.

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How do we decode writing such as what you're looking at right now? In 11th century Fatimid Egypt, under science-loving Al-Hakim (who had become ruler at age 11, but then disappeared mysteriously during a solitary walk 25 years later), Cairo was the apex of learning in the world: lots of trade with Mediterranean neighbors, a fearsome army recruited from Sudanese, Turks and Berbers, the Polynesian's sailing code long since cracked. Among the brains that drained toward Cairo at this historical moment was al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham (Western scholars called him "Alhazen"), from Basra. One project was to explain perception. Al-Haytham had read the recent translations of Aristotle and agreed that things we see enter the eye via the air, but al-Haytham elaborated with more physiological and mathematical suppositions about how perception happens. Furthermore, he said we perceive via a faculty of judgement, after inference. Pure sensation was different from perception, the latter requiring a conscious, voluntary act on our part. Here was a theory of gradations of consciousness, 900 years before Korzybski: there was first pure sensation (whatever we experience before words, analogous to Korzybski's "event level"); then we voluntarily attend to some phenomena (say, paying attention to letters and words and sentences on a page: perception); then we "decipher" the words, and finally: we are reading. Al-Haytham died in 1038. (I mention the 20th century polymath Korzybski; in the first half of the 18th century the Neapolitan polymath Giambattista Vico wrote, "People first feel things without noticing them, then notice them with inner stress and disturbance, and finally reflect on them with a clear mind."- The New Science, #53

                                 al-Hasan ibn al-Haytham, b.965

                                 wrote possibly the first great work in 

                                 optics, influenced Roger Bacon and 

                                 Leonardo da Vinci

Roughly 200 years later, under Europe's Catholic mullahs (led by Pope Clement IV), Roger Bacon - one of those guys interested in everything - was interested in optics. He'd read Al-Haytham, but was keeping it on the QT and yet still got persecuted for "unorthodox teaching." There were a lot of Churchmen who insisted rather violently that scientific research was dangerous to Church dogma (They have made some progress since then...). Bacon explained to the Pope how optics/perception/reading probably worked. Bacon and al-Haytham had both realized it's got to be far more complex than they'd suspected. In 11th century Islam, al-Haytham was not persecuted. Roger Bacon, soon after trying to explain to the Pope roughly the same theory, found himself in a cell. 

250 or so years later, Leonardo da Vinci was interested in this same problem of decoding perception and reading. But he was smart enough to know he could get in trouble: he wrote about it in his notebooks in a secret code that could only be read when held up to a mirror. 

It's only in the last 80 years that we've gotten a thick neurobiological account of how reading occurs and there's still interesting problems being worked out at this minute.

------------------------------

When looking into codes and ciphers, codes are one thing, ciphers another; all translation from one language to another is codework; any language you can't read can function as a code to crack; at one time only priests, kings, and scribes/accountants knew how to write and read: for everyone else in the culture "writing" was a code. 

O! So many codes! And right out in the open. If only we could crack/hack/decipher/decode...

-----------------------------------

Not long ago I yet again re-watched one of those films from the Great Age of Hollywood Paranoia (c.1971-1976): Three Days of the Condor, in which Robert Redford plays a CIA agent whose specialty is reading novels, looking for codes embedded in them. These codes would apparently qualify as steganography. Messages hidden within other messages...and how do you know I'm not doing that right now? (If I'm doing it, please take my word for it: it's all in good, clean fun.)

I remember when I first saw Condor: I thought Redford's job was a fiction-writer's fancy. But apparently it's a real thing, and being taken more and more seriously by...yes, CIA, but all sorts of others working in the (not so) Great Game.

What if some of our best conspiracy writers and novelists of exquisite paranoia were leaving code in their books that hadn't yet been cracked? I mean...it could happen, right? Maybe not, but we never know. Let's not rule it out completely. Which reminds me of a passage in Don DeLillo's haunting, hilarious, deeply paranoid and postmodern White Noise. The main character - who is a professor specializing in "Hitler Studies"? - his ex-wife works for the CIA:

She told me very little about her intelligence work. I knew she reviewed fiction for the CIA, mainly long serious novels with coded structures. The work left her tired and irritable, rarely able to enjoy food, sex or conversation. She spoke Spanish to someone on the telephone, was a hyperactive mother, shining with an eerie stormlight intensity. The long novels kept arriving in the mail. 

It was curious how I kept stumbling into the company of lives in intelligence. Dana worked part-time as a spy. Tweedy came from a distinguished old family that had a long tradition of spying and counterspying and she was now married to a high-level jungle operative. Janet, before retiring to the ashram, was a foreign-currency analyst who did research for a secret group of advanced theorists connected to some controversial think-tank. All she told me is that they never met in the same place twice. (p.213)

Maybe it's just me, but "high-level jungle operative" makes me laff. 

White Noise is one of DeLillo's short novels, but there are some really "long serious novels with coded structures." Hmmmm...

---------------------------------

Speaking of postmodernists, Douglas Rushkoff, in his wonderful book Program or Be Programmed, writes that the postmodernists were right to be suspicious of language and "reality," but they didn't go far enough: they hadn't accounted for the hidden biases of code writers whose codes were embedded deep within our digital gadgets. (see pp.83-84, ibid)

-------------------------------

Well, the pre-postmodernists, often called simply Modernists? A few of them left works so cryptic (and therefore threatening to dull minds, like J. Edgar Hoover's), that they became suspect. 

Even though James Joyce never set foot on Unistat soil, Hoover saw him as a threat. Joyce had an FBI file. Because someone in Joyce's extended circle was a known communist, Joyce was suspected as one, too. (He was more of an individualist-anarchist of some sort.) From Claire Culleton's Joyce and the G-Men:

Even as early as 1920, Joyce had been plagued by rumors about him and his work, and he was (laughably) reputed to be a spy for the Austrians, the British, and the Italians. He even complained to his brother Stanislaus that Ulysses was believed to be a prearranged German code; Ezra Pound had heard that "British censorship suspected Ulysses of being a code." (p.45, Culleton)

Anyone who's looked at Finnegans Wake for 5 minutes might wonder what the eternally paranoid agents of Control thought Joyce must have been up to. If we go back to the early distinction between codes and ciphers, and al-Haytham's and Roger Bacon's and Leonardo's forays into human perception and reading, well, then surely Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are written in code, only in a different semantic sense than what an asshole like J. Edgar Hoover would sense as "code."

Similarly, Ezra Pound, after being captured by the Allies in Italy, had to answer to the charge that his Cantos were some sort of code. (see one of my earlier posts on codes, HERE, skip down to "Modernist Investigative Poets Are Suspects (By Definition?)"

-----------------------------------------

The great cryptologist David Kahn writes about the enigma of the "emotional bases of cryptology," reminding us that "Freud stated that the motivation for learning, for the acquisition of knowledge, derives ultimately from the child's impulse to see the hidden sexual organs of adults and other children. If curiosity is a sublimation of this, then cryptanalysis may be even more positively a manifestation of voyeurism." (p.755, The Code Breakers) Kahn follows with a long line of later psychoanalysts who basically agreed with Freud, and many who challenged his idea. Nevertheless, I find the idea cosmically funny. I mean: if Freud's right - and I don't think he is, but anyway - then if you've read this far and feel like you acquired some knowledge from the OG, 'tis only 'cuz you're some sort of very well-practiced voyeur! Which reminds me of Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.

Fairly early in the book, you'll recall, Allied spies have noticed that US Army Lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop has sexual conquests all around London, and they're followed by V-2 rocket hit - in the same place he had sex - a couple/few days later. They don't know why, but there are theories. Rockets and hard-ons...Slothrop's penis must have a "code" to crack...it - his dick - was possibly encoded by...who? Does he know? Slothrop seems to not know. How are they going to crack this code? Talk about an Enigma!

                                       psychedelický grafický umělecké dílo Bob Campbell

Obscurity, Codes and Puzzles in Books: Ponderings

"Censorship is the mother of metaphor." - Borges

While I'm on record as being with the cognitive neurolinguistics of Lakoff, et.al., as my main model for the mother of metaphor, Borges here gets at something I find exceedingly interesting: the now-marginalized idea that writers have used coded language for various reasons, and one of them would be to escape persecution by the State. I give Borges his point here.
-------------------------------------------
Joyce's Friend Byrne's Crypto

With the debates about mass surveillance and encryption continuing on to what I assume is a slow boil, and with brilliant high school students bringing the debate (literally) to Capitol Hill, many of us of a certain caste of mind eventually wonder where and when this began. One day we find ourselves in the archives and indexes of old books. We learn some of what we set out for. In my case - and probably (?) yours - you get the serendipitous hit, too. A recent example from my own forays:

John Francis Byrne, who was James Joyce's best friend at university in Dublin, later invented a cryptographic device that he thought might make him rich, because it was an uncrackable "Chaocipher," which used what's called an "autokey" in the trade. It was a cigar box with some bits of strings and a few odds and ends. When Byrne showed it to his cousin she said it would win him a Nobel Prize, "not for science, apparently, but for ushering in an age of universal peace by conferring the gift of perfect security upon the communications of all nations and all men." - The Codebreakers, Kahn, p.767

                                                       J.F. Byrne, Joyce's friend

Byrne thought his device would be used by businessmen, brotherhoods, religious groups and social institutions, and by "husband, wife, or lover." (Kahn, quoting Byrne, p.768) Anyone could use his device anywhere and it would provide perfect encryption. Byrne met with and tried to sell his device to the US Army, State Department, AT&T, and the Navy, and was turned down. The State Dept sent him a form letter, telling him their own "ciphers are adequate to (our) needs."

Byrne, who published a book in 1951 called The Silent Years, mostly about remembering Joyce, devoted the final third of his book to telling the world about his amazing encryption machine, and actually challenged the public to crack his code, offering "$5000 or the total royalties of the first three months after publication of his book..." (Kahn, 768) Byrne challenged the American Cryptogram Association, the New York Cipher Society and Norbert Wiener to crack his code.

Kahn:
"Nobody ever claimed the money, and Byrne died a few years later. One may presume that the reason both for the failure of the public to read his cipher and failure of the government to adopt it was that while the cipher probably had its merits, its many demerits outweighed them for practical use. Byrne, like many inventors, both won and lost. His cipher was never broken. But his dream never came true." (768)

                                            David Kahn, 2013. His book The Codebreakers
                                            is a tour-de-force.

When Joyce came back to Dublin in 1909, another of his old friends from university, Vincent Cosgrave, told Joyce that Nora had "walked out" with him - Cosgrave - around the time Nora fell for the dreamy writer, which devastated him. He wrote accusatory letters to Nora, who was living at their home in Trieste. He wondered if Giorgio, his first child and only son, born in 1905, was really his. Byrne tried to convince Joyce that Cosgrave and Oliver St. John Gogarty (the model for Ulysses's "Buck Mulligan") were trying to ruin Joyce. It was a plot. Joyce's brother Stan told James that Nora had rebuffed Cosgrave, and this calmed the Irish/cosmopolitan bard.

In real life, Byrne lived with cousins at 7 Eccles Street in Dublin, which is the address of Leopold and Molly Bloom. Byrne is "Cranly" in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the character who lends a sympathetic ear to Stephen's aesthetic ideas, amongst other things. The section late at night in Ulysses, where Bloom has forgotten the key to his house, so he jumps the fence and gets in through the backdoor and lets Stephen in? That actually happened with Byrne. Joyce makes me think of it as a mythic thing, which is marvelous on his part...

By 1910 Byrne had emigrated to New York, where he worked as a journalist under the name J.F. Renby, an anagram of his last name. He died in 1960.
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Arthur Melzer Makes Me Think

"Against history, we developed community through the use of a subtle and ambiguous language that could be heard in one way by the oppressor, in another way by your friends. Our weapons of sabotage were ambiguity, humor, paradox, mystery, poetry, song and magic."
-Andrei Codrescu, the Romanian essayist, broadcaster and poet, in his 1990 The Disappearance of the Outside: A Manifesto For Escape, pp.38-39

In a dizzyingly wonderful book that leaves me wondering what I'm missing, Michigan State professor of political science, Arthur Melzer, published Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing (2014).

[Get a load of his out-of-book appendix, a real data-dump of historical textual examples that bolster his claims that esoteric writing (writing in a tricky way in order to not be persecuted or not damage the body politic, but it's more complicated than that) has basically gone on since writing and the State emerged.]

The book was reviewed widely and positively...by NeoCons. The bad reviews seem to be from anti-NeoCons. Melzer says the book needed to be written, and the subject - which was one of Leo Strauss's main riffs - wasn't really Melzer's thing. He doesn't like esoteric writing. He wants to read writers who say exactly what they mean.

I've read the book and find it magisterial. Then I made the mistake of re-reading a book of essays, mostly by Umberto Eco, with contributions by Christine Brooke-Rose, Richard Rorty, and Jonathan Culler: Interpretation and Overinterpretation. I find it heady stuff. But it worsened my probably paranoid overinterpretation of Melzer's avowed reluctance to address the topic, and his NeoCon ties.

Melzer:
"My friends and colleagues all regard it as curious that I should be the one to write this book. There are people who have a real love for esoteric interpretation and a real gift for it. I am not one of them."
-p.xvii

And yet there's 450 pages (plus that online appendix!), scholarly throughout. And then I'm into Eco, illustrating how paranoid overinterpretations occur. And there's NeoCon Mark Lilla, in his book on Vico (who to me is the most interesting example of what Melzer calls "defensive esoteric" writing), saying he disagrees with Leo Strauss on an esotericist reading of Vico. (See G.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern, pp.243-245)

Before Melzer's book appeared, for years I'd accumulated notes on the topic on my own, but I hadn't read NeoCon godfather Strauss's 1952 Persecution and the Art of Writing. I accumulated notes based on my readings of Robert Anton Wilson, William S. Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Norman O. Brown, Frances Yates, Nietzsche, etc.

The British empiricist Isaiah Berlin knew Strauss and liked him, admired his mind, but thought a lot of his ideas were wrong, including the esoteric idea:

Berlin:
"Strauss was a careful, honest and deeply concerned thinker, who seemed to have taught his pupils to read between the lines of the classical philosophers - he had a theory that these thinkers had secret doctrines beneath the overt one - which could only be discovered by hints, allusions and other symptoms, sometimes because such thinkers thought in this fashion, sometimes for fear of censorship, oppressive regimes and the like. This had been a great stimulus to ingenuity and all kinds of fanciful subtleties, but seems to me to be wrong-headed. Strauss's rejection of the post-Renaissance world as hopelessly corrupted by Positivism and empiricism seems to me to border on the absurd."
-Conversations with Isaiah Berlin, with Ramin Jahanbegloo, pp. 31-32

And yet Berlin seems to me one of the most astute readers of Vico. And yet: I agree with Berlin about Strauss's rejection of Modernity. And yet: Melzer's book seems overwhelmingly persuasive.

I have not read my way into yet another Chapel Perilous. But I have once again become, lately, ever-more hyper-aware of my own interpretive schemes in reading.

The headspace? Cosmic hilarity!
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Ending in a Southernly Direction

Lee Server interviewed the late great Terry Southern, and here's a passage apropos:

Server: Reading Candy as a kid, I'll confess to you, played a definite part in my growing into manhood - I don't intend to go into details. What would you read for "erotic purposes" as a youngster?

Terry Southern: When I was young, they had what were called "little fuck-books" - which featured characters taken from the comics. Most of them were absurd and grotesque, but there were one or two of genuine erotic interest; "Blondie" comes to mind, as do "Dale" and "Flash Gordon" and darling "Ella Cinders." For a while, convinced there was more than met the eye, I tried to "read between the lines" in the famous Nancy Drew books, searching for some deep secret insinuation of erotica so powerful and pervasive as to account for the extraordinary popularity of these books, but alas, was able to garner no mileage ("J.O." wise) from this innocuous, and seemingly endless, series.
-Now Dig This: The Unspeakable Writings of Terry Southern, 1950-1995, ed. Mike Southern and Josh Alan Friedman, p.2
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                                                   grafica di Bob Campbell

Gnostic Diffusion Down Through the Ages

While walking around UC Berkeley recently, I passed the Anthropology building, named in honor of Alfred L. Kroeber, one of the first great Anthropologists in Unistat, who was there at the creation, studying under Franz Boas. Kroeber had a lot to say about how ideas, tools, techniques, etc: spread from one area to another, and he called it diffusion and developed a sort of taxonomy of different types of diffusion.

                                        Alfred L. Kroeber, American anthropologist
                                        who spent most of his career in Berkeley, and
                                        is the father of science fiction writer
                                             Ursula K. LeGuin

As I walked and my thoughts percolated to the rhythms of wandering around a redwood-heavy area, I thought of all the heretical ideas I've been drawn to, and the idea of diffusion: did all the "countercultural" ideas diffuse down through the ages? Or, what seems far more likely, did only some of them diffuse and evolve from say, 3000 years ago? Or, what about a counter-idea about diffusion that we often see, "evolutionary diffusion", which says that all humans have psychological traits in common, and that novel ideas will show up at roughly the same time, in different geographical areas, just because, we were ready for those ideas or inventions? Think of Newton and Leibniz inventing calculus at the same time. Or Darwin and Wallace. Or Priestley and Lavoisier and an obscure Swede named Carl Wilhelm Scheele and oxygen. Or any number of other inventions in which there appears to be zero evidence that information diffused (via spying?) from one area to another.

Charles Fort said something about, "It's steam engines when it comes steam engine time." (I paraphrase from memory here.)

No doubt people take their languages, inventions, techniques, ideas, and wander over the hill, get on a jet, and drop those things in some far-flung area, changing that second area in some way. But I tend to think both types of diffusion are always going on: evolutionary and the other types.

Then I started thinking about Ezra Pound. I'd written about Pound and conspiracy theories a while back. But there I didn't cover one of my favorite Pound conspiracy theories: the goddess cults which were forced underground when the Christians came to power while the Roman Empire began to crumble. They'd probably originated in Greece, Ez seemed to think.

Pound had, at around age 21, traveled to Europe and, while visiting the Ambrosian Library in Milan, had stumbled onto some troubadour manuscripts. He taught himself Provencal and made a terrific study of 12th century southern France, where "courtly love" - a very large part of what we consider to be "romantic love" in the 21st century West - was invented.

From 1208 to 1229 the Catholic Church waged a hellaciously brutal, bloody war against some heretics called the Cathars. (The Albigensian Crusade.) The Cathars were wiped out, their manuscripts burned. Apparently the Cathars were into a religion that was the 13th century's version of pagan sex as a religious thing. But the Church's story was that the Cathars were practicing a dangerous form of Manicheanism, which was an idea that the human body is a prison, and that this world was made by a fake god; the Real God was Out There somewhere. I admit this sounds like a pessimistic take on religion, but if the Cathars thought this, why was it such a threat? (I bet you have more than one good answer for that one!)

Pound thought the Cathars didn't think any such thing. He'd walked Southern France and found it utterly delightful. And he'd done an intense amount of reading in...well, everything. Pound started giving lectures in England on the troubadours and their revival of a goddess-based view of the world, one that saw experience in the natural world as a sacrament, that sensual pleasure was a basic good and in tune with what a true Deity would want for us. We do well to harness our perceptive powers, take joy in sensuous delights and sex and poetry and music and the natural world: all of this leads to a state of ecstasy. Now we can see why it was a threat to the Holy Catholic Church! It was the old pagan-goddess-sex matrix, the obtaining of a religious buzz from outside the Church confines, and the Pope and his soldiers conspired to quash it, always.

Pound made a study of troubadour music and art and found nothing of the Manichean pessimistic dualism in their work; on the contrary, he saw the awakening of the Goddess in their work (what survived the burnings). Pound came out with The Spirit of Romance, which articulated his ideas, in 1910. As to the idea that there could have been a Goddess-worship revival alongside a cult of pessimistic gnostics: Pound seemed to have some serious doubts. Furthermore, the Church had always tried to stamp out neopaganism wherever they saw it; this new Goddess religion had to go.

To be sure, the Manicheans have been considered by many writers on Gnosticism to have been a genuine strain of gnosticism; however, there were other gnostic groups that scholars paint as being far more fun to hang out with. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll - this general spirit - may have started with them. Pound's troubadours - who probably overlapped considerably with Cathars? - seem to fit this bill just fine.

When you read about the Eleusinian Mysteries, goddess worship among the Greeks, Epicurean philosophy and its permutations and coded texts under repressive regimes: these were the earlier version of what Pound thought he'd unearthed in Provence.

Did the valuation and veneration of attuned perception, music, wine, sex, and partying in the fields on a warm summer night ever die? No.

But then neither did the Empire.

                                Supposedly this is Idries Shah, but you never know with
                                  this guy...

Robert Anton Wilson, a Pound scholar but not an academic one, loved Pound's ideas, but never seemed to commit to any one narrative along these lines. RAW's historical ideas about diffusion seem to entertain both evolutionary and the other types of direct transmission. In a letter to Green Egg from 1974 (which I couldn't find at rawilsonfans.com), RAW tries to trace the origin of Wicca, and asserts that Gerald Gardner invented it in the 20th century, with help from Aleister Crowley. Gardner created a history for Wicca that extended back to the Stone Age, and as William S. Burroughs might have said, "Wouldn't you?"

                                                Gerald Gardner, probably the main
                                                brain behind modern Wicca

In 1974 RAW says he's bee trying to trace the true history of Wiccan ideas for "seven years" (so he started around the Summer of Love?), and says, as he often did, that with more and more research and information, "I am more confused and less certain than ever."

He entertains Idries Shah's ideas that the Wiccan tradition was drawn largely from the Sufis in the late middle ages: "Anyone who has remaining doubts can simply attend a Sufi dance and a Wicca festival in rapid succession, whereby it will appear obvious to the senses that the same basic rituals are being used for the same basic purposes." (Or was RAW just trying to get you to go to Sufi and Wicca parties so you'll never be the same again?)

Then RAW admits that Sufism may be merely an "Arabized offshoot of Gnosticism." This gets us back at least 2000 years, wot?

Then, because this was RAW's metier, he muddies things up considerably for us, asserting Crowley wrote some things that Gardner picked up almost word for word, but then Crowley had a "sensitive psyche" and could have picked up his ideas from ESP or witch covens that existed near him. He cites Francis King and Jessie Weston, who influenced Eliot's The Wasteland considerably (and Pound edited that poem, recall). Weston, if you read her From Ritual To Romance closely, she may have "been in contact with a proto-Gardnerian coven circa 1900-1910." This all ties in - maybe - with the Golden Dawn and the Ordo Templi Orientis.

RAW then says if you're trying to research this stuff and looking for earlier and earlier citations of the label "withcraft" you're selling yourself short:

"If we widen our lens and look at the subject of 'Christian heresies' and 'non-Christian heresies' and 'secret societies' etc, if we compare alchemical texts with Rosicrucian pamphlets and early Masonic charters, etc, a great deal begins to come into focus, as I hope to show in my forthcoming book on Crowley, Lion of Light."

[Wilson never did publish a book on Crowley called Lion of Light, but his writings on Crowley are voluminous and...diffuse and diffused throughout his oeuvre. For more of RAW's writings along the lines of this what he's writing about in this obscure letter to Green Egg, see his book Ishtar Rising.]

In the same letter RAW talks about all the various ways "pagan" ideas may have diffused throughout the world over the last 2000 years, although he doesn't use the term diffusion. The reason it's difficult to know for sure about diffusion is that it rarely leaves a trace: you need extensive documentation to make a case, but often Authority/Control burned that documentation. Or, as RAW writes about the many ways heretical ideas diffused: "Many other permutations and combinations are possible, and probable, considering the ferocity of persecution and the need for secrecy."

RAW ends his remarkable letter (signed off as "Mordecai the Foul," his Discordian Society name) by citing P.B. Randolph, a 19th century black American physician, who probably imported the idea of sex magick into North America. RAW thinks - based on evidence - that this amazing character (I want to read much more about this dude!) passed the knowledge of sex magick - who learned it by studying Voodoo! - to Unistatians. The more common notion of transmission of sex magick, in 1974 and according to RAW, seemed to be Templars ---> sufi magicians ---> Karl Kellner of the OTO---->Europe and then Unistat.

Wilson may have, at times, been influenced by the Sufi method of interpretation, ta'wil. The short explanation of this is "esoteric interpretation" or "creative hermeneutics." I said he may have...

An article on Randolph from 2000

On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts: Part 5

When rifling through certain histories, it appeared a stark glum fact that I could blog every day for five years just on the Russians and this topic. I'll confine my remarks to just this one "Part 5."

1613-1917

The Romanovs

ruled Russia

from 1613 to 1917 --

Some were sane &

some were bonkers

Alexander I, the tsar from '01-'25

was the son of Mad Tsar Paul I

who was murdered

with Alexander's "connivance"

according to the

              Penguin Dictionary of Modern History

-Chekhov, by Ed Sanders, p.26

There's a 1976 essay by George Steiner, "Text and Context," in which he attempts to describe what texts "mean" in culture. He has some fascinating ideas about readers and writers, and as a slight digression I'll quote this sentence, "To read essentially is to entertain with the writer's text a relationship at once recreative and rival. It is a supremely active, collaborative yet also agonistic affinity whose logical, if not actual, fulfillment is an 'answering text.'"

I personally knew a few of you, and I feel this sort of relationship with you, not all of the time I'm writing, but a lot of it. And I find this really exciting and mysterious and just a total intellectual-semi-enlightened hedonistic blast. So: thanks. Some of you I've never met but who I feel this same way nonetheless: how odd this seems. My nervous system, writing. You: decoding, being with me and yet "recreative and rival." Now I will try to link this emotional involvement with some writers and readers to history, simply via juxtaposition: 

Steiner points out how deep the textuality of Russian culture has been, due to political repression by Tsars, the Orthodox church, the Bolsheviks and Stalin. With Marxism/Leninism the "bookishness" of the culture was something we in Unistat have never seen. With hard-core intellectual ideology as a (supposed, at least) function of the State, we get a populace of readers intensely bookish, concerned with canonicity and exclusion or validation, origins, authority..."It is the tradition of reading these texts --exegetic, Talmudic, disputative to an almost pathological degree of semantic scruple and interpretive nicety -- which constitutes the presiding dynamic in Marxist education and in the attempts, inherently ambiguous as are all attempts to 'move forward' from sacred texts, to make of Marxism an unfolding, predictive reality-principle." (see "Texts and Contexts" in Steiner's On Difficulty and Other Essays, p. 5)

[NB: "Talmudic, disputative to an almost pathological degree" plus coded texts and information-dense texts seems to equal a level of High Weirdness our species can't seem to do without.]

What concerns me here, for our purposes, was that there was such a long history of fascination with deep reading in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution. And under the mystical tsars, much radical, oppositional writing had to be done embedded in thick dense works, encoded, or simply as samizdat. Indeed, when Steiner discusses Loren R. Graham's "seminal" (I have not read it - OG) Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, Steiner writes that this bookishness is the medium of power and and official discourse and this attitude towards texts lies "in the very fabric of suppression which defines Russian history as a whole [...] But whatever the source, the effect is clear: the subversive poem, novel, satirical comedy, underground ballad has always been, is, will always be, the primary act of insurgence. Even when it has reached the public surface, through the censor's oversight, from abroad, or in brief spells of bureaucratic condescension, Russian literature, from Pushkin and Turgenev to Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, has always been samizdat." (p.6)

O! That books and reading could mean that much!

I just now recalled a trip my wife and I took to Prague, around 2002. As always, I crashed beforehand on Czech history, memorized about fifty common phrases from an idiot's phrase-book, and read something on the history of Czech literature. (I remember the first night we got to our hotel-room, and we quickly walked back out to go find a place to dine: we had to cut through an old churchyard, and there was a statue of Karel Capek, the early science fiction author and anti-fascist, on the church grounds.) And I was reading on the Czechs under Soviet rule, 1960s-70s (their Velvet Revolution happened in late 1989), and was taken aback by, if I recall correctly, Josef Skvorecky, one of the great Czech writers of the second half of the 20th century, when he said he sorta missed the samizdat years, when everyone was fearful their revolutionary writings would be found out, and they'd be captured, and imprisoned. Why? Because he thought the secrecy lent an intense gravity to the writing! 

I can see this, I can imagine living in that system, but give me an open society without all the drama, please! But it is an interesting idea: that repression fuels intense reading and writing. Back to the Russians, or rather, a Russian.

Pushkin

Thought by many lit critics as at least as important to the Russians as Twain is to Unistatians or Goethe to the Germans, Pushkin was steeped in Romantic revolutionary fervor, heavily influenced by Byron, living in the mood of the French Revolution's Liberty/Equality/Fraternity. Born in 1799, he took advantage of a brief opening after Waterloo, as Sanders writes, to "seize freedoms underused." He wrote on subjects that would be unthinkable later in the 19th century: a poem called "Epistle to the Censor." Pushkin attacked the system of serfdom. He ridiculed the Tsar in an 1818 poem, "Noel." He ridiculed the Minister of War! Pushkin wrote an "Ode to Liberty" in 1817 as samizdat, and many soldiers memorized it by heart. ("Tremble, O tyrants of the world/And you, o fallen slaves, arise!") He was named as the author and fled for a few years to self-imposed exile. But secret police followed him and kept him under surveillance. His writing began to soften under the pressure, it became "more objective" and his revolutionary writings became more coded in his narratives. As possibly the Main Guy for nine out of ten potential revolutionaries in Russia, Pushkin was being deflated. No more openness for Pushkin. 

                                                          Pushkin: proto-Decembrist

 Let me back up a bit on early 19th century Russia, and I hope I'm not boring those who've studied this period.

Pushkin was involved with some offshoots of Freemasonic secret societies in Russia. When Russian troops marched, in 1814, into Paris during what is commonly called in Unistat the Napoleonic Wars they had had their minds blown: look at what a relatively open society brings!  A similar thing happened to Unistat troops who grew up on little farms and then went into what is commonly referred to as World War I: they saw Paris, Berlin, Florence: they could never be the same when they came home, if they were lucky enough to come home alive and intact. Some of the Russian soldiers, exposed to France and revolutionary ideas of the West, young and relatively educated, formed secret societies called the Green Lamp, a sort of free-love and freethinking group - always conducive to wild partying - which may have been a branch of another secret society, the Union of Welfare. Pushkin has friends in the secret Union of Salvation. All of these groups seem to be precursors to the Decembrists. 

Think about it: these Russian troops, having defeated Napoleon, go back to such a repressive environment that the only way they thought they could enact change towards more openness and constitutionality was via underground secret societies. Most of the sources I've seen think Pushkin was seen as a too-mad "poet," and while he was welcomed in the secret societies, the brain-trust military revolutionaries didn't want to risk letting a "poet" in on the secrets of possible insurrection. 

[On second thought about secret societies: maybe this is some sort of default mode in history, at least since the rise of Rome? Why are secret societies mostly asterisked and seemingly snorted and laffed at in college textbooks on history? I ask this rhetorically.]

Anyway, here's what happened to the Decembrists: on December 1st, 1825, Tsar Alexander I either died or disappeared in order to become a religious hermit. Tsar Nicholas I took over. The Decembrists - roughly thirty military officers, almost all fairly well-educated from the upper crust and led by Paul Pestel, backed by 3000 soldiers - mostly illiterate - tried to prevent the senate from taking an oath to the new Tsar. A true do-or-die moment, an attempt at radical freedom and a break with entrenched repression. They hoped more of the garrison would rush to their side, but they didn't. Many turned and fired at the Decembrists and their backers. A dozen were killed and Pestel and all others rounded up and hanged. (December 14th is coming up as I write this. Think of them?)

With the calamitous collapse of the Decembrists, Pushkin rushed to burn his incriminating papers.

Nicholas was one of the worst tyrants in history. He summoned Pushkin to Moscow and told him he would personally be Pushkin's censor, and that Pushkin was to be under constant surveillance by the chief of secret police Benckendorff, and also that Pushkin would be forced to wear the uniform of "Gentlemen of the Chamber." Pushkin died in 1837 at 37, "shot in the stomach."

If you didn't know this story, you know it now. And you must never forget it.

A Too-Long Addenda: Bakhtin, Shostakovich and Stalin

I had no idea, but when reading David Foster Wallace's essay on Joseph Frank's writings on Dostoevsky from Consider the Lobster, it seems that Mikhail Bakhtin was forced to write about Feodor in a coded, tricky way, due to official Soviet ideology about Dostoevsky. If you've read Bakhtin on semiotics and you've read Dostoevsky's history as a radical almost shot, then as a intensely religious freak whose moods are so dark in his novels I find certain young people I know and think, "Jeez, I hope (s)he never gets around to Dostoevsky...it could send 'em over..." and then consider that Bakhtin had to code his writing about FD...my mind reels. It just seems another dire symptom of humanity when you take it all in...and of course the stunningly brilliant mind of David Foster Wallace couldn't hack "all this" anymore and he hanged himself in his garage in Claremont, California...Whew! I need to start meditating more, or score some Xanax. 

This all seems to relate to what Steiner was saying about Russian culture, since, I guess, at least 1613.

March 25th, 1949, the Waldorf Astoria in New York: a huge gathering of Soviet intellectuals and artists met with a CIA-backed consortium of non-communist artists and intellectuals. Hard to believe, but read Frances Stonor Saunders's The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the World of Arts and Letters. What an amazing book! Anway: Nicolas Nabokov - first cousin to the author of Lolita and a good pal of Isaiah Berlin's - made his way into a panel where Dmitri Shoskakovich was expected to speak. Nabokov's aristocratic family had fled Russia soon after the 1917 rev and he became a composer, taught in Unistat universities, etc. 

Apparently the panel discussion was dull until Nabokov took the floor. I'll quote from Saunders's book:

Nabokov said, "On such-and-such a date in No. X of Pravda appeared an unsigned article that had all the looks of an editorial. It concerned three western composers: Paul Hindemith, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky. In this article, they were branded, all three of them, as 'obscurantists', 'decadent bourgeois formalists' and 'lackeys of imperial capitalism.' The performance of their music should 'therefore be prohibited in the U.S.S.R.' Does Mr. Shostakovich personally agree with this official view as printed in Pravda?" 

Immediately, the Soviet contingent cried "Provocation!" A KGB "nurse" whispered instructions in Shostakovich's ear, and then Shostakovich, rose, his face ashen and hung low, looking at the floorboards, he quasi-mumbled, "I fully agree with the statements made in Pravda." (p.50, Saunders)

Shostakovich had been made to attend this meeting in NY by Stalin himself. (This was around the time, in the USSR, that sculptors were told to enter a competition to honor Pushkin, and the winner produced a sculpture showing Stalin reading Pushkin.)

In 1979 a book titled Testimony, by a Russian musicologist named Solomon Volkov, appeared. It immediately became controversial because it purported to be the memoirs of Shoskakovich, who had a lot of nasty things to say about life under Stalin. Furthermore, Shostakovich says he embedded his views on the totalitarian regime in his music! Many accused Volkov of embroidery, even outright forgery.

There is plenty of evidence that official censors in the 19th century went over composer's music to see if they could catch hidden codes that could be considered subversive. How this was done specifically is another story...

Flash forward to a few years ago and an interesting book, Music For Silenced Voices: Shostakovich and His Fifteen Quartets, by Wendy Lesser. HERE is a review by Ed Rothstein of the NYT. (If it's not there when you read it, please tell me in the comments; the NYT withdraws links every now and then, for their own reasons. Thanks. - the Mgt)

I leave it to the Reader/Listener to decide for herself.

On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts: Part 4

Eleutherarchy
I mentioned Finnegans Wake ("FW" to Wakeans) in my last electro-broadside. There seems a very real sense in which Joyce and his High Modernist pals were engaging in writing that was so tricky, so puzzling, so absurdly-densely allusive, that their texts, by their very forms, experimentations and demands upon the reader, are a counter to the practice of Law. (Vico seems to hover over all this, too, but I refuse to digress any more than I already have here; NB I haven't even finished this first paragraph, Jeez! Oh wait...)

When you're a lawyer and, say, you get to argue before the Supreme Court, and a decision comes down, you have "made law," according to lawyer-speak. Poets and Bards of all stripe have spoken of Eleutherarchy: the making of freedom, or another reality.

In his 1976 book Investigative Poetry the poet Ed Sanders argued for poets reclaiming the writing of history. As an earlier example Sanders cites Ezra Pound's wild collage method, which was heavily influenced by Ernest Fenollosa's notebooks on Chinese writing and how it could act as a medium for poetry: the notorious ideogrammic method. "Purest Distillations from the Data-Midden: the essence of Investigative Poetry: Lines of lyric beauty descend from the data clusters. [...] The Cantos of Ezra Pound first gave us melodic blizzards of data-fragments. History as slime-sift for morality [...] And Pound was a skilled collagist: the lesson is this: that an Investigative Poet of any worth at all will have to become as skilled a collagist as the early Braque." (Investigative Poetry, pp.9-10)

                                                   Ezra Pound, not locked in a cage.

Modernist Investigative Poets Are Suspects (By Definition?)
I will have more to say on "by definition" when I address one James Jesus Angleton of the CIA, but suffice for now, this story about Pound. He was arrested by American military men in Italy, near the end of what is popularly called World War II. He was wanted because he he'd made broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini; the story of why quickly becomes intricate, but if the Reader is interested I strongly urge an investigation of why Pound did it. He made all kinds of broadcasts, and they are noted for an abhorrent and marked antisemitism. But he was also trying, in his own deranged way, to save the idea of Jeffersonian democracy in Unistat. I see no reason to disbelieve Mad 'Ol Ez's earnestness. The Allies suspected these radio broadcasts were of a treasonous nature. Pound was caught and kept at the Disciplinary Training Center near Pisa, in a cage fit for a large wild cat at a zoo, open to the sky. He wrote poetry while being held there, and seems to have had a nervous breakdown. The poems he wrote while caged are now referred to as The Pisan Cantos, and they later won the Bollingen Prize, something between a Pulitzer and a Nobel for poetry.

These poems passed through the hands of the censor at the DTS. He became very concerned. They were suspect due to overwhelming difficulty: they might be written in a secret code to some Axis spies! Pound was told of these suspicions and answered in a letter, trying to reassure the censor that he wasn't apt to pull a fast one:

The Cantos contain nothing in the nature of cipher or intended obscurity. The present Cantos do, naturally, contain a number of allusions and recalls, to matter in the earlier 71 cantos already published, and many of these cannot be made clear to readers unacquainted with the earlier parts of the poem. 
   There is also extreme condensation in the quotations, for example "Mine eyes have" (given as "mi-hine eyes hev") refers to the Battle Hymn of the Republic as heard from the loud speaker. 
   There is not time or place in the narrative to give the further remarks on seeing the glory of the lord.
   In like manner citations from Homer or Sophokles or Confucius are brief, and serve to remind the ready reader that we were not born yesterday.
   The Chinese ideograms are mainly translated, or commented in the English text. At any rate they contain nothing seditious.
   The form of the poem and main progress in conditioned by its own inner shape, but the life of the D.T.C. passing OUTSIDE the scheme cannot but impinge, or break into the main flow. The proper names given are mostly those of men on sick call seen passing my tent. A very brief allusion to further study of names, that is, I am interested to note the prevalence of early american names, either of whites of the old tradition (most of the early presidents for example) or of descendants of slaves who took the names of their masters. Interesting in contrast to the relative scarcity of melting-pot names. 
-written in 1945, first published in The Paris Review, vol. 7 no. 28 (Summer-Fall 1962)


The road to Eleutherarchy can prove a tough one to hoe.

Internal Immigration: A Brief Note
In meditating on the multifarious reasons why a text comes down to the adept reader as obscure: it seems difficult to doubt that, as I said in an earlier section on this topic, that at times the text simply represents the inner caste of mind of the heterodox writer; he's an odd egg, this one. Let us see if we can catch what he's on to. It seems that the poetic intellect who speaks to his colleagues in a baroque and ramshackle way, filled with archaisms and wild digressions and dense allusions and rhetorical flourishes of a surprisingly virtuoso bend...will end up writing in an obscure way.

Then again, the obscure texts may represent a migration in mind away from the immediate circumstances. Outwardly, the writer gets along in some social situation that is repressive. Inwardly, (s)he has moved into a cultivated world of symbols, often intensely personal and so inherently obscure to us.

So yes: we must also look at the socio-political milieu in which the writer operated. Was what (s)he seemed to get at, when unpacked, a possible threat to fascists or totalitarians of some sort? This may be a difficult problem - if there is one - to ascertain. A further problem, and one holding seemingly many more possible difficulties: what about the writer's immediate family and circle of friends and acquaintances? What might be threatened if not for an exceedingly odd act of writing?

I feel this subtopic of what I have called "internal immigration" veers too far away from the main thrusts here; nevertheless I find the questions brought up by the idea quite noticeably pregnant. If I recall correctly, I first saw the term "internal immigration" in a text by Noam Chomsky, and I would bet he was using it in a different sense than I have here. Nonetheless: Chomsky? Dankeschon!

On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts: Part 3

More on Leo Strauss and...Me?
Clearly, if Wilhelm Reich's model of history in The Mass Psychology of Fascism is even close to being accurate, even "in the ballpark," then fascist systems are the default mode in all societies since roughly the rise of agriculture. There are short gains made, lots of reversions to the old class warfare of the Few against the Many, until the Many get pushed so far they revolt, and the Few make a concession or two...then work furiously to nullify it. This story runs all through Vico, too.

If something like this "is" right, then it makes sense that there has always been a need for some writers to write obscurely, in some sort of code that can cover for them if called in for questioning. Concomitant to this, there has probably always been some form of samizdat, probably going back to Chinese writing on rocks. (Anyone got the goods on that, by the way?)

[This seems like the perfect time to mention that I'm very much aware of Umberto Eco's idea about "paranoid overinterpretation." It doesn't worry me, but it does at times come in quietly and haunt me for a while, before leaving me alone. I jest, but slightly. Let me say there are times when I allow myself the indulgence of some scary-movie paranoia based on some reading of a text: they're - and you know how They can be - out to get me, but "get" seems the operative word here; it seems murky and a pinch lovecrafty. HERE's some interesting writing by a blogger on this sort of stuff, ya know, like...if you're into it.]

I brought up in Part 1 my personal dissonance vis a vis Isaiah Berlin disagreeing with Godfather of the NeoCons Leo Strauss in that Strauss thought writers write obscurely, sometimes 'cuz their minds work that way (even though he was a Mage, I can't help but feel the exceedingly odd Austin Osman Spare fits in here), but other times because writers fear Authority. Berlin thought that was basically wrong; I have long thought it was right, but find it uncomfortable agreeing with anything Strauss thought (the more I delved into him, the creepier he and his cabal looked to me); after vexing about this before sleep two nights ago, I awoke with my answer, and felt much better and kinda lame for not realizing and elucidating it earlier: Strauss picks which texts he thought one must "read between the lines" to understand in his own convoluted secret society of NeoCon hermeneutics; I assume almost all writers are saying what they're saying unless I have very good reason for thinking otherwise. I have my own hermeneutics, influenced by many a disparate thinker.

I assert Strauss's system is more about reading so that the texts will say what he wants them to say: that there's Good and Evil, relativism is wrong, almost every political philosopher after the Renaissance has it all wrong, and he and his acolytes know by reading the texts in a special way how to see this. HERE is a pretty good article on Strauss. Pay special attention to sections three and six, "esotericism" and "esotericism revisited." (But I still urge the interested reader to search out Xenos's Cloaked in Virtue. Saul Bellow's last big novel was a roman a clef called Ravelstein, centered around a character who was perhaps Strauss's most famous pupil for a long time, Allan Bloom - the same guy who wrote The Closing of the American Mind - who hated relativism of all sorts, hated rock 'n roll, and was a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS. Strauss appears in that book as "Felix Davarr.")

So: I think my bend is more toward writing and less toward reading, although obviously these two acts can never really be separated. I think any one of us would find reading and writing much more difficult to disentangle than we might have thought. I don't think it can be done, but I'm willing to be proven wrong.

James Joyce, Luigi Serafini, the OULIPO, and the Voynich Manuscript
And not all esoteric texts are about evading persecution, obviously. Most devotees of Finnegans Wake are well aware of Joyce's statement about hoping to keep the scholars busy for a thousand years and that he wrote for "an ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia." Joyce's dreambook used a template based on Vico's theories about rising and falling throughout history, and Vico appears on the first page of the..."novel"?

Luigi Serafini seems to not be hiding anything that will bring down the current order in his miraculous, marvelous work of surrealism replete with a writing system that has only been decoded maybe about 5%, the Codex Seraphinianus.

                                         a page from the exceedingly obscure Codex Seraphinianus

The wonderful - mostly French - writers in the OULIPO group write obscure texts, but this is mostly because they are interested in what can be yielded, textually, by utilizing a mathematics of constraint. Now, there may be something very radical politically going on among some of the OULIPO, but I have not seen it, nor have I read of anyone else finding something there. At this point, I'd like to say that the Italian writer Italo Calvino was the greatest oulipean yet (see especially his If On A Winter's Night A Traveller), and I'd also like to put in a good word for American oulipean Harry Matthews, especially his Singular Pleasures, which, even though he doesn't consider this work oulipean, still: 61 little vignettes about masturbation? You gotta hand it to him.

And what of the possibly eldritch, possibly forged, possibly dangerous Voynich Manuscript? It hasn't been cracked, but from the writing I've read about the problem of the text, it seems like the writers were trying to keep something from somebody...but who? And why? And what is going on there? (WARNING: If you have a certain caste of mind and have yet to look into the problem of the Voynich, it might suck you in. Please take this warning seriously! Be careful! The Voynich has claimed more than one victim! - the OG)

Religious Texts and Peoples Persecuted: A Few Melancholy Notes
Along the lines of books so powerful to Authority they must be hunted down and burnt due to their possible danger and threats to official Power, I will simply type the term Albigensian Crusade and the term Gnostic Gospels.

Clearly, some other times and places in which alternative visions of religious "truth" were more heavily frowned upon than persecuted with extreme prejudice. But eventually outright persecution devolved upon deeply pious mystics, from their own people and from the powerful, fearful and ignorant outsiders. An example of this would be the early mystical writings among the Jews, which eventually evolved into kabbalah. Perhaps the greatest scholar of kabbalah, Gershom Sholem says early on in his Kabbalah that early mystical writers in the Judaic tradition not only had very esoteric ideas, but they wrote under pseudonyms and stressed an ascetic life of contemplation and deep study of texts, but that "The clear tendency toward asceticism as a way of preparing for the reception of the mystical tradition, which is already attested to in the last chapter of the Book of Enoch, becomes a fundamental principle for the apocalyptics, the Essenes, and the circle of the Merkabah mystics who succeeded them." Unfortunately, the more orthodox, those outside the tradition, and others found this very pietistic asceticism threatening: "From the start, this pietist asceticism aroused active opposition entailing abuse and persecution, which later characterized practically the whole historical development of pietist tendencies (hasidut) in rabbinic Judaism." (page 11) Here the outward appearance of pietism and asceticism aroused hostilities towards these groups, and of course, their books. Which were "weird." (Even today, when someone professes to have studied the kabbalah, I listen and doubt quickly and seriously they've put the time in. 'Tis a rare devoted reader of kabbalah, it seems to me, even though it has possibly never been more "popular" on the world stage than right now...

Hermeticists
It could be that, for most of Joyce's "nightmare of history" magicians, hermeticists, and alchemists (are there really any differences between those?) feared persecution but also had other reasons for writing in obscure modes. One idea that seems intuitively "right" to me is that these people - at least they at times professed this - it could be because they knew they were going to be hounded. As Alexander Roob says in his Alchemy and Mysticism: The Hermetic Cabinet , "Many voices, even within their own ranks, were raised agains the 'obscure idioms' of the alchemists. And their own account of their communication technique hardly sounds more encouraging: 'Whenever we have spoken openly we have (actually) said nothing. But when we have written something in code and in pictures we have concealed the truth.'" - Rosarium Philosophorum.

Roob goes on:
"The tendency towards arcane language in 'obscure speeches,' in numbers and in enigmatic pictures, is explained by a profound skepticism about the expressive possibilities of literal language (my emphasis - OG), subjected to Babylonian corruption, which holds the Holy Spirit fettered in its grammatical bonds." (pp.8-9) This all might qualify as some species of group denial: but about what, why, on whose part? And how conscious was this denial that they are writing oddly because a skepticism about the possibilities of "literal" language, and not because they feared violent persecution by some Diocletian, some Shi Huang Ti, some model for King Ubu? You write so obscurely because of "a profound skepticism about the expressive possibilities of literal language"?

Yes, and I wonder what happened when they told that to the Judge?

But I jest. This subject is not all that filled with hilarity, I admit. But we have all had a bad cover story at one time or another, haven't we?

Or at least it must've appeared "bad" to Authority. "But dad...I was smoking pot only because it allows me to get closer to God."

On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts: Part 2

Vico: Writing Oddly to Deflect Attention?
Vico seems to be writing in an intellectual backwater (although his immediate social world seems fascinating, but perhaps beyond the scope of what my topic is now) of Naples under the Church and its Inquisition, which was everywhere around Naples. He seems to have been a humanist with desire to believe in Catholicism, but he had read Lucretius deeply as a budding scholar and this pagan idea of people evolving from more basic forms in an atomistic universe had a very deep hold on him. He seems to have been a strange, isolated genius far ahead of his time, which was probably dangerous. If he had allies - and he did - they kept quiet about what Vico was really getting at. Berlin writes in an essay on the "Divorce Between the Sciences and Humanities" (collected in The Proper Study of Mankind) that Vico's "mind was not analytical and scientific but literary and intuitive." Years later the scholar Anthony Grafton asserted that, despite Vico's wish to preserve scholastic metaphysics, he was steeped deeply in Descartes and Bacon, and indeed, his magnum opus looks like an attempt to do for social knowledge what Isaac Newton had recently done for scientific knowledge. Grafton avers, "Despite his dislike of the new natural philosophy, Vico learned a vast amount from its prophets."

Vico's Jews
One of the "funniest" (and I mean that in at least two semantic senses) of Vico's moves is his take on the place of Jews in human history. Early on in his great melange, under "Establishing Principles," Vico states:


The true God founded Judaism on the prohibition of divination. By contrast, all the pagan nations sprang from the practice of divination. This axiom is one of the principle reasons why the world of ancient nations was divided into Jews and pagans. 


This idea is found throughout The New Science. The Jews are directly under the dispensation of God; all the rest of us are descended from (get this) Giants, as found in the OT, after the Flood, and who are still around, sightings of Bigfoot being the proof. Jews are of smaller stature, which shows they are not descended from the postdiluvian story. The pagans, after the Flood, wandered the forests of the world, mute and stupid, shitting everywhere and having sex indiscriminately, until a few families with strong, heroic fathers, settled down and started farming and villages, which turned into cities. And every now and then savages would wander in from the jungle or forest and seek refuge from the solitary, nasty, brutish life in the wilderness. And they were basically slaves in the early city-states. But I leave so much out.

Vico's Non-Reception 
Okay, so this bit about the Jews and pagans: What did the Inquisition think? We don't know, because Vico published his first version on his Newtonian historical sociology in 1725 and they probably didn't know what to make of it. (As many modern readers in 2011?) He financed its printing by selling a ring, and it appears it fell dead from the press. Who read it then? Jean Le Clerc was a big-time journalist, so Vico sent a copy to him, hoping for a good review. Nothing. Same with the copy he sent to Sir Isaac Newton.  He revised his Great Book furiously - in great manic burst of energy - over the years, published it again in 1730, to no acclaim. I think he must have started to feel persecuted by oblivious, probably malign forces. He assumed other intellectuals in Naples thought he was a madman. The final version, in 1744, the year he died, is a sprawling mess of wonderful insight for the dedicated reader. He appears to have slowly sank into a madness, whether of poverty and neglect, paranoia and persecution, or maybe he slowly fell into High Weirdness due to the effects of a serious head wound he suffered when falling off a high ladder in his father's bookshop as a youngster. He'd written a letter brimming with bitterness near the end of his life in which he said he expected nothing from his native city except a complete isolation, which allowed him to work hard at putting his Great Work together.

A Gloss on Vico: Language and Law and Class Warfare Through the Ages
When the Fathers of large, settled families needed to keep their children in line they used religion and violence. It was harsh, but it worked. When stragglers from the forests or countryside asked for protection, they were put to hard work. The Fathers grew richer and found it useful to use religion and violence against the stragglers too. Soon previously isolated Fathers and their sons and extended families met other villages and Fathers. They found they had things in common, including private Law. As these families made common cause, their private law became public Law. Far more important than fighting each other, they knew they must fight the new class of refugee-straggler-outsider-slave-plebe. The private law of the Fathers became the public law of the Aristocrats. There was no "social contract;" Vico believed the development of reason was too far in the offing.

Much of what was private law seems still public law to this day: The Fathers were originally the priests, so they read the auspices and said what god had told them, in whatever the mode of communication. The priests were the Fathers were the Wise were the Kings were the Lawmakers. They were the Heroes who valiantly protected the family from Monsters. They said who was allowed to own the land and profit by it. For Vico, Law is a form of Severe Poetry. (Why "poetry"? The answer, like everything when discussing Vico, is complex.) In section #444, Vico says, "Generally speaking, metaphor makes up the bulk of vocabulary in all languages."And as Cognitive Neurosemantics is showing in studies done in our day, metaphors are the atoms of thought and language. If the Nobles were allowed to name (note what "noble" means to us, to this day) and to make the laws and to say what God really wants, what does this imply about political control?

For a brief sketch of how the banded plebes gained rights from the severe Noble Gentes, read Vico under "Establishing Principles," numbers 40-45, in which he courses from the Law of the Twelve Tables through the Second Punic War. From there, throughout the long book, one must read very carefully when Vico talks about changes in history, law and punishment. No wonder he has something for seemingly every political persuasion under the sun! He's crafty, diffuse, obtuse and vague just enough.

                                       Here's a painting of Vico, who though he died in 1744, 
                                                    seems to be coming into his own only now.




A Sufi Fits Here
Husayn ibn Mansur al-Hallaj the sufi-mystic was executed - crucified and dismembered - in Baghdad in 922 AD. "He propounded the principle of complementarity[...] as in the Ying Yang disc, black and white embrace and contain sparks of each other embedded within themselves. In one sense God is everything and Iblis (cognate with what we'd call "Satan"- OG) nothing; yet God cannot be realized as the Beloved without a lover, even and especially a tragic lover, one doomed to separation." Satan was required for divine unity, according to Hallaj. For proclaiming this openly - that "evil" needs its opposite, he was killed. Another sufi, Ahmad al-Ghazzali agreed with Hallaj, but avoided execution, and Peter Lamborn Wilson thinks it was because yes, Ahmad had a powerful orthodox sufi brother, but also: Ahmad avoided execution "by the very density of his mystical language."-p.89, Sacred Drift: Essays on the Margins of Islam

Esoteric Groups: According to Robert Anton Wilson
Wilson was interviewed in 1989 and David Jay Brown asked him this question, after Wilson said that secrecy impedes the flow of information and therefore slows the growth of real wealth, which is about know-how, know-what and not money:

DJB: Why do you think it is then, that it took so long for occult knowledge to come out of secrecy into the open?

RAW: Well, that's largely because of the Catholic Church. Anybody who spoke too frankly for many centuries was burned at the stake. So the alchemists, hermeticists, Illuminati and other groups learned to speak in codes.

DJB: So you think it was fear of persecution, rather than a feeling that most people weren't "ready" for the information quite yet?

RAW: Well, I think that's a rationalization. You can't find out who's ready, except by distributing the information. Then you find out who's ready. - p.113, Mavericks of the Mind: Conversations For The New Millenium


Evading Authorities: William S. Burroughs
One could blog day after day on just the subject of Burroughs and his ideas about language. But in an introduction to an omnibus edition of WSB's work, Ann Douglas writes that "Burroughs' early style was founded on drug lingo and jive talk; he was fascinated by their mutability, their fugitive quality, the result of the pressure their speakers were under to dodge authority and leave no records behind. His later work elaborates and complicates this principle. No one form of language can hold center stage for long. Fast-change artistry is all; sustained domination is impossible." - p. xxiv, Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader


A Passage From Peter Dale Scott
And for what? Should we simply accept 
             that (as the court historian
     Nebrija wrote in his dedication


to Queen Isabella of Spain)
              language is the instrument of empire?
    I ask these questions


not out of hopelessness
             but pondering my own role
     and that of those I trusted


in today's cunning of reason
-p.179, Minding The Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000


Question here: if language is the instrument of empire, how is/was it encoded? Why do so many Murrkins not even agree Unistat is, has been, an empire? When the evidence is stupendously overwhelming?

Magick and Philosophers in the Renaissance
Frances Yates reiterates over and over in her magisterial Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition that philosophers interested in magic must be careful: theirs is the "good magic" as distinguished from what the Ruling Class and the masses believed was a "bad" type. Furthermore, all the good types of magic emanated from the foreseers of Christianity, or even from Moses himself!

You could get away with this for only so long. Even John Dee, Elizabeth's court astrologer and one of the great Mages of all time, had his library ransacked by the mob. Bruno himself was "terribly burned" at the stake in February of 1600. Bruno wrote in code, but he spoke in perhaps too direct a manner, and to the wrong people, for too long. The Inquisition wiped him out, and Vico knew very well about this.
--------------------------------------------
I could go on and on and on with examples. Pushkin? Shostakovich? William Blake? Ovid? Shelley? Perhaps I will go on, but I will admit: it's not "fun" blog-reading...

On Obscure, Coded and Alchemical Texts: Part 1

Preliminary: Vico and Weirdness
There's an essay from 1974 by George Steiner called "On Difficulty" that I've often dipped into or just re-read. In it he provides a taxonomy of difficulties vis a vis the reading of certain texts. But he doesn't address an issue that has long fascinated me: the deliberate obscurantism by a writer out of necessity of not being persecuted by Authority.

As some of you know, I'm fascinated by the writing of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744), a quirky Neapolitan scholar who toiled largely unknown in Europe, but was rediscovered in the 19th century and has seen his academic stock rise ever since. He's been "claimed" by fascists, anarchists, liberals, Neo-Cons, and Karl Marx cited him in Kapital. He's now thought of by some as the founder of Anthropology. As a young thinker he, like much of Europe, got caught up in a love for Descartes, but then lost his religion and combatted "Renato"'s ideas for the rest of his life.

If you haven't yet checked in on Vico, his magnum opus is translated in English as The New Science. Vico reads like a Mad Scientist: he's totally brilliant and way ahead of his time and you're floored by the power of his ability to create new views of receiving ancient texts. A few pages later you're wincing as you read, his ideas are so crazy. Then he seems to repeat himself, oddly, because he's done the fashionable thing and tried to lay out a way of understanding an entire body of knowledge in the way that Euclid did, via the positing of axioms, and building from there.

Despite the ostensibly formal structure, Vico's great book is diffuse, tangential, discursive, baroque, and wonderfully nutty.

A more poetic take on Vico comes from the great scholar Anthony Grafton:
"Vico's history of the human race, in short, is less a fresco painted spontaneously than a Watts Tower of found objects, combined in dazzling new ways but often old and battered in themselves..."-p.xxix of the Intro to Dave Marsh's translation of the The New Science

I agree with Grafton. It's also so profound in its insight that I will never stop reading Vico, neither his New Science nor any of the other books that I'm so fortunate someone saw fit to translate from Italian.

I would like to use Vico as both a home base and a jumping off point for a series of essays on obscurity in texts throughout history. When I address the "nutty" and obscure and strange aspects of Vico, I am coming down on the side of those who say that Vico wrote in this obscure manner because he had a very real sense that what he was trying to say about history and language and class warfare, that the Inquisition would do him great harm if he wrote plainly. When I first encountered this idea it knocked me on my ass, and my fascination with this aspect of writing and reading texts throughout history has stayed with me.

                                     When you open a copy of Vico's New Science, you see this, so
                                                 overflowing with symbolism it's a veritable semiotic feast of codes!

The Strange Case of Isaiah Berlin and Leo Strauss
One of the greatest readers and commentators on Vico in the 20th century was Isaiah Berlin, an intellectual of magnificent scope and breadth, with an elegant prose style and a very creative, even playful way of dealing with Great Ideas. I am in awe of Berlin the intellectual. One of the things I have tried to learn from him is this: you get to know a book or author or thinker so well you can talk about his ideas as if you are an Adherent. And yet you are not a believer or hardcore fanatic of any one thinker. It's a sort of intellectual yoga: study a person or a book or a set of philosophical ideas so intensely that a reader or listener will mistake you for an acolyte. I think it's an aspect of love to be able to talk about someone's ideas in a way that makes the original thinker you talk about sound totally fascinating...even if you find some of the ideas personally distasteful.

It's not easy.

And I came upon this passage in Conversations With Isaiah Berlin, that the Iranian intellectual Ramin Jahanbegloo conducted in 1988 and 89, the book being published in 1991:

RJ: What do you think about Leo Strauss and his political philosophy?

Berlin: I knew Leo Strauss personally and liked him. He was a very learned man, a genuine classical and Talmudic scholar, who thought that political philosophy went gravely wrong with Machiavelli - "the teacher of evil" - and has never recovered since. For him, no political thinker since the Middle Ages has found the true path. Burke came nearest to it, but Hobbes and his followers had gone badly wrong and gravely misled others. [...] Objective Good and Evil, Right and Wrong, have been dethroned. [Now here's where it gets meaty- OG] Strauss was a careful, honest and deeply concerned thinker, who seemed to have taught his pupils to read between the lines of the classical philosophers - he had a theory that these thinkers had secret doctrines beneath the overt one - which could only be discovered by hints, allusions, and other symptoms, sometimes because such thinkers thought in this fashion, sometimes for fear of censorship, oppressive regimes and the like. This has been a great stimulus to ingenuity and all kinds of fanciful subtleties, but seems to me to be wrong-headed. Strauss's rejection of the post-Renaissance world as hopelessly corrupted by Positivism and empiricism seems to me to border on the absurd. - pp.31-32

Okay. Wow. First off: When I first happened upon this delightful book of transcribed conversations I had mired myself in a vast Straussian swamp, trying to understand this Godfather of NeoConservatism and how he became so influential. The more I read, the more occult he seemed, with his acolytes, who were largely behind the George W. Bush administration, and, by my way of assessing history, largely responsible for bringing Unistat to its knees, possibly (probably?) never to recover.

From my readings, Berlin's assessment that Strauss's rejection of positivism, empiricism and other, relatively SANE ways of modeling the world and reading political philosophy is not only "absurd," it borders on a systematized insanity. It's a fascinating story, and I wonder if Peter Dale Scott would call the whole Strauss nexus of conservative acolytes as part of Deep Politics or Deep History?

["If history is recorded, then deep history is the sum of events which tend to be officially obscured or even suppressed in traditional books and the media. important recent deep events include the political assassinations of the 1960s, Watergate, Iran-Contra and now 9/11. All these deep events involve what I call the deep state, that part of the state which is not publicly accountable, and pursues its goals by means which will not be approved by a public examination. The CIA (with its ongoing relationships to drug- traffickers) is an obvious aspect of the deep state, but not the only one, perhaps not the dirtiest."-PDS]

That Berlin knew Strauss and liked him! That Strauss tried to "convert" Berlin when Isaiah visited him in Chicago! (p.32, op.cit) That Berlin seems to think it "wrong-headed" that Vico's style is so baroque and weird because of "oppressive regimes"! That I seem to be on the side of Leo Strauss, who, if one gets into arcane critical texts about how Strauss taught his Inner Circle how to read people like Hobbes (see, for example the slim but truly excellent Cloaked In Virtue: Unveiling Leo Strauss and the Rhetoric of American Foreign Policy, by Nicholas Xenos)...I had to step away from the books.

I will say that reading Xenos's book and a few others (like The Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet), led me to understand why Ron Suskind was told by a Bush person that Suskind lived in the "reality based community": the Bushies were so steeped in Straussian ideals (which seem to me to be profoundly antidemocratic and yea, I'll say it: fascistic) that their "reality" was being forced on the larger world...

I mean, think about it: they started a $3,000,000,000,000 war on Iraq (according to Nobel Prize economist Joseph Stiglitz) with ZERO proof Iraq had anything to do with 9/11...and they got away with it!!!

But I digress. I wanted to illustrate that I found a disagreement between me and Isaiah Berlin, and I do think outside influences can warp the writing and style of a writer. This idea is thought of as paranoid by some people. I will argue my point largely by giving examples as the main ballast for my rhetoric. I think it's related to the long Nightmare of History, and ought more properly be thought of as part of the history of censorship and another of our favorite topics at the Overweening Generalist: book burning.

As I go on with this topic in later installments, I hope to score some points against one of my heroes, Isaiah Berlin, and in so doing make some of you think maybe I'm some seriously Smart Dude who really ought to be paid more attention, if only for the unmitigated brilliant sheen of his thought. <cough>

Here's a 10 minute video on Isaiah and his ideas of Negative vs. Positive liberty. Throw it in at the end here because I think it covers some Hidden History, etc: