Hermes Will Always Return: Kircher and Vico

God of orators, poets, thieves, witty chatterers, inventors, an intermediary for humans in their dealings with other gods and goddesses, and a trickster himself: this is Hermes, probably a later version of Thoth, but once we get into origins here, it's a hermetic thing: that is to say: tricky and possibly unreliable. But Hermes - also the messenger, the god of email and letters and phone calls - who will help you ease into the afterlife, who straddles and then erases boundaries and protects travelers into unknown lands? He will always be with us.

The great American seer and weirdo extraordinaire Edgar Cayce asserted that Hermes built Atlantis and the Egyptian pyramids. More than anything else here, I note Cayce's ingenium.

Hermes is well-known to our Islamic brothers and sisters too, only he's Idries (or Idris) to them. Ibn Arabi, most Estimable, wrote that Idries traveled to incredibly large cities outside of Earth, and these cities had vastly superior technology. When a muslim invented something, he may have subsumed something from the atmosphere brought there by Idries.

Hermes is mentioned in the Qur'an, 19:56-57: "mention, in the Book, Idris, that he was truthful, a prophet. We took him up to a high place." Indeed, it was thought that Idris traveled from Egypt to outer space and heaven, to the same place Adam was, and this was where the Black Stone originated. Adam was 380 years older than Idris. The Prophet Mohammed was descended from Idris. Mohammed also traveled to outer space. (It's difficult when I read this stuff to not think of our postmodern comic book superheroes as existing in a long line of archetypal figures such as Hermes...and Mohammed? Ahh...but The Prophet...this is surely a different story, peace be upon him...)

For the Arabs: three Hermes-figures. One that was a civilizing hero who wrote in hieroglyphics. Then there was one that was initiated by Pythagoras. A third taught alchemy. There were some sufis who thought they were all the same guy...

Idris seems to be identified in The Bible as Enoch. See Genesis 5: 18-24. Supposedly the consonants in "Enoch" spell out the Hebrew "initiator" or "opener of the third eye." Supposedly? Hermes the boundary dissolver and messenger god somehow gets into the Old Testament? Hey, I guess it's in the job description.

Cicero noticed there seemed to be at least five different Hermes, mostly Greeks and Romans, around the time of Julius Caesar, but this incredible genius everyone talked about, "Hermes Trismegistus," seemed to be a different cat.

"Hermes Trismegistus" made an enormous splash in Western thought, especially when 15th CE philosopher/mage Marsilio Ficino was given a patronage/cool gig under the Medicis. "Hermes Thrice-Blessed" was probably a contemporary of Moses, but Hermes went from physics and math to the primo level of telling us, armed with the most righteous wisdom the attributes of God, about demons, how souls transform and travel. You know, the meaty stuff. Orpheus followed Hermes, then Philolaus, who was the teacher of...Plato? Wait...what about Socrates? Nevermind for now: we have quite a succession now, eh? Of course Plato's ideas heavily influenced Jesus and Christianity. Indeed, Jesus was a Mage himself, in that grand succession starting with Hermes. This succession of wisdom-givers was  ultimately seductive to the many minds who desire intellectual harmony.

To say the least.

I think the idea that there was a prisca theologia, or "one true theology" that has become garbled in different religions over time, a series of books that held a skeleton key that would unite all religions and show how they were all saying the same thing, originating in God, down to Moses and Hermes, down to Plato and Jesus...must have seemed like it had not only unparalleled delights for the intellect, but could possibly stem the tides of blood from religious wars.

                                                 Hermes Thrice-Blessed, imitating 
                                                  Kobe Bryant?

The Corpus Hermeticum was written by Hermes Trismegistus, roughly at the time of Moses. And it had...EVERYTHING in it! For Hermes Thrice-Great had handed down the secrets of magick to humans: astrology, alchemy, the whole nine. His works were a thrilling wind, blowing many-a-mind.

The fantastic philologist Isaac Casaubon, just before he died in 1614, showed via rigorous textual analysis, that the books attributed to "Hermes Trismegistus" were written no later than the 2nd or 3rd century CE! Possibly some of the Corpus was written in the first century after Jesus. But it's one thing to have awesome philological and overall scholarly chops and quite another to be given a sufficient hearing in the face of so many intellectuals awestruck with the heady, buzzlike effects of reading in the Corpus Hermeticum.

Casaubon suggested that these books were written by various Greek-educated NeoPlatonists and maybe a few Epicureans. They combined ideas from the great buffet of religious ideas floating around the Roman Empire circa 120-300 CE. It seems probable that the ideas in the Corpus were also hot in Hellenic Egypt, but are nowheres near as old as Moses and definitely much later than Alexander's death. Ideas borrowed from Zoroastrianism, even Kabbalah. If you prepared your mind well enough you could turn base metals into gold, find the Philosopher's Stone and the key to immortality, develop superhuman talents, and other desiderata.

Much of this is known already to readers of the scholar Frances Yates, so I apologize if I bored you.

Kircher (1602-1680) and Hermes
One of my favorite intellectuals in history is Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit who was interested in everything, and if you clicked on the link you noticed Paula Findlen's subtitle, "The Last Man Who Knew Everything." He was most highly esteemed as a scholar, producing countless books, some over 1000 pages long and gorgeously illustrated. In his time he was also the butt of many jokes, as those who followed the new ways of thinking spearheaded by Galileo and Descartes, thought Kircher a crank, and Kircher was even "punked" for his delusions that he could read Egyptian hieroglyphics. Kircher is operating in 17th century Rome, while throughout Europe new-fangled epistemological bombs were exploding every few years. Kircher, within his own lifetime, went from being "current" to declasse, so fast were ideas changing about how to assess the veracity of claims of "truth" or "knowledge" or "science." Casaubon's debunking of the antiquity of the Corpus Hermeticum when Kircher was circa 12 years old, was available; even though his superiors at times frowned on Kircher's intricate, elaborated details of how "magic" worked according to Hermes - Kircher always issued disclaimers that this was not the true catholic religion, so beware of this evil stuff - he certainly seemed wildly enthralled by what Hermes had to say.

                                                   Athanasius Kircher, whose name
                                                    means "eternal church." 
                                                      Coincidence?

Kircher is, to me, a marvelous and hilarious figure, immensely learned and yet silly, and finally a general biography for the lay reader has come out: A Man of Misconceptions: The Life of an Eccentric in an Age of Change, by John Glassie. What a marvelous book. Glassie has Kircher nailed in a way that I had suspected from my readings of him by more specialized scholars such as the aforementioned Findlen, Ingrid D. Rowland's marvelous work The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome, incredible books such as John Edward Fletcher's A Study of the Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, 'Germanus Incredibilis', Joscelyn Godwin's 2009 Athanasius Kircher's Theater of the World (which, if I came into a surprise inheritance, would be one of the first books I'd buy; for now: keep re-checking it out from the library), and the book emanating from Stanford University's extensive Kircher archives, The Great Art of Knowing: The Baroque Encyclopedia of Athanasius Kircher.

Rowland's book gives more than enough goods about Kircher's researches and how he held many ideas that went against Church doctrine, and so had to find ways to put his ideas in codes. But he was wrong about most things. Which: never matter: that's the sociology of knowledge: most of his ideas were "right" or interesting enough to galvanize minds. Kircher was self-aggrandizing while claiming to be extraordinarily humble; the stories he tells about how he evaded threats in his youth (with the help of his Faith and prayers to Mary, etc) seem heavily influenced by Homer and other Hero tales.

                                          Kircher's museum. In reality it was nowheres
                                          near this spacious...which hints at the man 
                                          himself: be careful when you read Kircher!

With Kircher you get something like Aristotle mixed with High Weirdness Crank, a forerunner to Flann O'Brien's de Selby character as filtered through the mind of Robert Anton Wilson. (Just have a look at Kircher's learned and wildly baroque ideas about geology and how mountains are filled with water, the role of volcanoes, how water enters the inner Earth near Sweden and comes back out near the South Pole, etc...)

Despite his weirdness and ego, he was truly learned and had the most fantastic imagination, and I'm glad Glassie's book is getting good reviews. More people who love the history of this period, or even the sociology of knowledge or the history of ideas, should find Kircher a delight. Despite the learned flights of imagination presented as "science," for the glory of the Church and Rome and humanity, he's an amazing thinker, fecund beyond belief. Even the ideas that turned out to be wrong - most of them - are so imaginative, speculative and marvelous in vision that the students of metaphor have a field day every time they pick up Kircher.

Anyway, as for Hermes: Kircher loved those books. If he'd heard they'd been debunked, he didn't care. One of Kircher's best-sellers explained China to Europeans for the first time. Kircher had never been to China (or Egypt), but that never stopped him from writing 1000 pages about it. One of the things we learn is that the Chinese knew Hermes too, but they called him "Confucius."

At the same time, I believe Kircher was earnest. He thought the heliocentric model was correct. And he knew about Galileo's troubles with the Authorities (Kircher's bosses). Kircher did not understand the "new" scientific method of doubt, testing, getting someone else to see if they can replicate your experiments, etc. But Kircher also knew what happened to another Wild Thinker, Bruno. Kircher wrote to a friend that he was a Copernican, but "We must always maintain that the white I see, I shall believe to be black...if the hierarchical Church so stipulates." (Glassie, p.101) Because Kircher lived under this aspect of "You must not see what the Church would not like you to see," I can never be completely sure what Kircher really thought about some of the ideas he promulgated.

Here's an interview Glassie gave to NPR about his Kircher book.

I first encountered Kircher in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and I confess I thought it was all a put-on. I thought David Wilson had made up Kircher, just as he made up the Cameroonian Stink Ant.

Vico and Hermes
Vico was born in 1668 and says the idea that all the world's wisdom came out of Egypt fit into his proto-anthropological idea of "the conceit of nations." Vico was overweening in his awareness, via his astounding breadth of reading, of what we would call today "ethnocentrism." He knew of Casaubon's finding and honored it. In discussing the effect of Roman scholars' belief in Egyptian ancient wisdom as ultimate source (on how Hermes influenced Diodorus Siculus and even Plato), Vico writes, "In sum, all these observations about the vanity of the ancient Egyptians' profound wisdom are confirmed by the case of the forgery Pimander, which was long palmed off as Hermetic doctrine. For Isaac Casaubon exposed the work as containing no doctrine older than the Platonists, whose language it borrows." - New Science, number 47.

Vico goes on to make a classic philosophically anthropological thought: "The Egyptians' mistaken belief in their own great antiquity sprang from the indeterminacy of the human mind, a property which often causes people to exaggerate immeasurably the magnitude of the unknown."

And yet Vico draws heavily from what he ascribes as an Egyptian idea of historical cycles, see section 432 of New Science. Also...the it turns out the Egyptians had quite the antiquity, so Vico was sorta wrong. But he's right about the "indeterminacy of the human mind," isn't he? This is Vico: right even when he's wrong. (And sometimes just plain wrong. But always: edifying and fun to read.)

Back to Vico's reading of Hermes: the first nations were founded by a severe poetry that became the Laws of the Ruling Class, or "heroes." The first bards sang out these laws. Much later they were written down. Thus it is with all nations, anywhen. But Hermes supposedly handed down writing, and then the laws were known. For Vico's origins of knowledge and poetic archetypes, this gets things backwards. As he writes, "How were dynasties founded within Egypt before the arrival of Hermes Trismegistus? As if letters were essential to laws! As if Spartan laws weren't legal when a law of Lycurgus himself prohibited the knowledge of letters!" (#66-67)

So how does Vico negotiate "Hermes Trismegistus"? He cites a "golden passage" from Iamblichus in which it is asserted that every invention necessary for civil life is attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. "Thus, Hermes could not have been an individual rich in esoteric wisdom who was later consecrated as a god. Instead, he must have been a poetic archetype of the earliest Egyptian sages who, being wise in vernacular wisdom, founded first the families and then the peoples who eventually made up the great nation." (#68)

And yet Vico, living in Naples, still had his own problems with the Catholic Church. But for that sometime later.

Vico's peculiar form of rationality notwithstanding, the trickster and god of messages survives. And people still believe in the influence of planets on their personal fortunes; people still use magical thinking...even well-educated and "rational" people. The Hermes archetype lives on within us.

I assert that Hermes resides in this entire blogpost; Authorities may justly kill him off, but he never dies. That's not the way the Gods and Goddesses roll, folks. Where do poets and inventors get their ideas?

Rushkoff's Presentism and Further Musings on Time

Prof. George Carlin was performing on The Tony Orlando and Dawn Rainbow Hour - a TV show - in 1976. He told the audience about Time as a concept. He said that there is no "present" that we can say to be truly living in because just as we identify it...ZOINK!...it's gone. We've moved on to the next moment. "There's no present. Everything is in the near future, or the recent past." - copped from Sullivan's delightful biography of Carlin, 7 Dirty Words: The Life and Crimes of George Carlin. The gnomish intellectuality of Carlin's POV on "presentism" notwithstanding, I do enjoy the para-Zen-like musing as a potent little philosophical riff, akin to Led Zeppelin's very simple but powerful, "Whole Lotta Love."

Both Carlin and Zep are "basic" but they rock-steady...On to my bit.

Douglas Rushkoff has produced yet another marvelous book, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Because most of the libraries in my area don't yet have it, or if they do the waiting list is too long, and also because I don't have any money, I once again stood (sometimes sat) in a bookstore and did a very fast read of the whole thing, over about two hours. I will re-read it when it's less the molten hot commodity and I have more time to devote to it. Speaking of time/Time...

                                           Douglas Rushkoff

Rushkoff says that, within our collective historical consciousness, our technologies have landed us in "the future." Now, and for the foreseeable future, which is now. So let's start to feel freed up from thinking of book-like narratives of seeing a beginning, rising action, falling action, climax, denouement (or variations of that), because terrorism, child starvation and global warming don't have these narrative structures to them. They're not like: dictators in Europe out of hand, killing people, Hitler invades Poland, death, more stuff pushes the action, death, Pearl Harbor, D-Day, death, death, death, Victory in Europe day, death, slaughter, carpet bombing, lives stunted forever, Hitler and Eva off themselves in a bunker, death and then another dollop of mass death, "discovery" of the Death Camps, Hiroshima, death, ticker-tape parade. That sorta stuff. (In my reading outside idiot-making "school" I developed a  habit of imposing complex, intertwingling narratives-without-end...both because I find these conceptions of "history" more true-to-phenomenological "facts" although not "identical" to them, and because I simply find it far more instructive and interesting to conceive of historical narrative this way. Ya got a bettuh whaddyacall..."method"? Do me a solid and let's hear it.)

There's so much going on with our gadgets now that we're not managing time in the way that will make us more happy; we're too caught up in the modes of Industrial (and corporation's) Time and this really ought to stop. It starts with you: maintain eye contact when you're with someone you really want or need to be communicating with. Ignore the cell phone when it vibrates. The email, your text messages, scrolling for Facebook "friends" can wait. Rushkoff's one of My Guys, obviously.

Franz Boas, trained as a physicist but he then invented Modern Cultural Anthropology, traveled to live among the Inuit. Extensive immersion-within-the-field studies were essential in this new discipline, which sought to distance itself from the old anthropology: reading the latest dispatches from missionaries, spies, or pirates and making armchair proclamations about..."the" Pygmies/French/Laplanders/Maori/Turks/Yanomano, etc. Boas wrote later about "culture shock." It's something that must have been experienced countless times before by missionaries and pirates; but Boas was a true intellectual and very reflective. The utter newness of the ways "eskimos" lived, what they thought and took-for-granted as "reality" disoriented Boas; it was all too much.  His mind was blown by the experience. Culture shock became a to-be-expected in the training of cultural anthropologists.

I had the Experience when I spent three weeks in Tokyo/Kyoto/Osaka/Kathmandu. But Boas stuck it out. His students - people like Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict and Alfred Kroeber and Edward Sapir and Zora Neal Hurston and many others developed an empirical view of "culture," and altered the idea of the Platonic One True Reality. A major aspect of cultural relativity is the observation that different peoples seem to experience Time very differently than Western Industrialized Humans, or anyone else under 24/7 electric lights/effective "grid", clocks everywhere, mass transit, schedule, schedule, schedule, metropolises, and mass communications.

Sociologist Alvin Toffler was a huge deal with he came out with his book Future Shock in 1970. This sort of shock was defined as "too much change happening in too short of a period of time," or something like that. It led to disorientation (and there was no Internet! no Twitter or Facebook or...blogs) and anxiety. It reminded me of Aldous Huxley's idea of the consciousness or nervous system on psychedelic drugs: it's as if "normal consciousness" was a garden hose with a kink in it, so the water only flows out in dribs and drabs, but on a psychedelic, the hose is unkinked and the amount of...information, perception, ideas, emotions...is overwhelming. It feels like a firehose in your brain, when what you're used to is...a dribble here and there. It can be - it will be - overwhelming. Your comfy old-sneakers whelm will be overtaken. But you knew that.

Another Net guru, Clay Shirky, coined the term "filter failure" as a sort of update on "future shock." This implies that we were all trained to acknowledge that some sort of mental "filter" or way of practicing a....mental hygiene? was part of our educations. (Was it yours?) Rushkoff, one of those that Richard Rorty would have labeled a Strong Poet, has minted some of his own terms here, the two that stick out most clearly being "digiphrenia" and "fractalnoia." On Rushkoff's blog he posted some of his favorite early reviews and media interviews, which probably flesh a lot of this out better than I've done here...

                                        George W.S. Trow

It's firehoses for everyone now, seemingly, and you don't even need LSD. Everyone is On, all the time, now, 24/7. Twittering, blogging, texting, chatting, On Demand. So where in the narrative arc of life or some current news story are we? We don't know. (I think George W. S. Trow had some amazing things to say about our lack of context - he loathed what TV had done to our sense of history, and see his short - so it won't eat up your TV-time - book Within The Context Of No Context.) And yet gadzillions of bits of information about what's "going on" is readily available. The Boston Marathon was bombed. There's a story! Now: to find out. Notice how the story plays out into the "future" (what will Unistat do with Tsarnaev?) and the "past" (was Tamerlane under the guidance of plotting, malevolent terrorist elders?). When will we "know" that this story has a climax and denouement? Answer: we will impose some sort of "ending" ourselves.

What, then, about our very real problems, like starvation and global warming? Here the story has even less of a discernible narrative arc. It looks like we can ameliorate, manage, divert, defer...the idea of the 19th century novel and our sense of historical events has broken down, aided by our extremely sophisticated communication gadgets. In his previous book, Program Or Be Programmed: Ten Commandments For The Digital Age (which is short and doesn't demand too much of your...time), Rushkoff urged us to be in our own real time, to not always be plugged in and "on," to live our lives without the imperatives of our digital gadgets, which are programmed by others, the code hidden from you. Are your gadgets using you to do what some corporations want? Or are you using your gadgets in accordance with your consciously-negotiated and present and personal values? His recent book seems to take on a far grander theme: how our sense of Time is and has been affected by technology.

The section on chronobiology was particularly interesting, and when I have more time alone, at home, to delve in it, I think I'll skip back to those bits first.

Another area of his thought I wish to study further: I confess I don't feel I've grokked in its fulness the riffs on money and capitalism and the dated Industrial Age and how we can get out of this mess. Rushkoff says we live in a "steady state real time economy" now. Maybe I'm brainwashed by the Corporations or Control, but I need tutoring on that one. He certainly seems to think he's on to something. Must...obtain...book...

One thing: why do we plan for the "future" when the banks will just steal all out retirement money anyway and any corporation we work for could not possibly care less about us? (This reminds me of the fiery, sharp, acid, and hilarious Lee Camp, reacting to the possible positive aspects of the recent news story that CEO pay has increased  1000 times since 1950 over what the worker makes. See HERE.)

At any "rate" (HA!), Time marches on and we're all wired with lots of information, to put it mildly. Do we know how to make sense of it all? We certainly have ample opportunities to panic, react with fear, paranoia, and to propagate more erroneous and just plain pernicious info outselves. Also: notice how we must always be "catching up" on the latest whatever. We've fallen behind. (Really? What are our lives about? Completing multiple "jobs" that we uncomfortably saddle ourselves with, seemingly of our own "free will"?)

Is this the "new normal"? I don't know, but I do know that the next person who says, "Well what I heard was that..." about a very recent news story will make me want to slug them in the mouth...but I won't. The OG don't swing that way. He all about Peace 'n shit. But do try to cite a source?

Rushkoff says we can make meanings of our lives filled with information by using a very powerful human tool: pattern recognition. And yet: he seems to buy the idea that we're in a post-narrative age; I tend to go along with this golden postmodern trope, but note there are enough Nuts who are angry that the rest of us won't swallow what they and only they possess: the Ultimate One True Truth. Rather, I see a radical breakdown of thousands-year-old hardcore narrative tropes. Most people are not hardcore ideologues who have one consistent POV. And Nassim Nicholas Taleb notes in his Bed Of Procrustes that people who think that intelligence is about noticing patterns that are relevant are wrong; in a complex world "intelligence consists in ignoring things that are irrelevant."

Finally, I got the idea that We have some semantic issues. I already thought that - hell I ALWAYS think that - but Rushkoff hammered more of it home. I was reminded of the great old anthropologist Weston LaBarre's term "group archosis," which he defined as "Nonsense and misinformation so ancient and pervasive as to be seemingly inextricable from our thinking." (found on p.53 of Robert Edgerton's book Sick Societies) 

Similarly, the world systems-theorist Immanuel Wallerstein dropped the term "unthinking" on me while I was reading his Uncertainties of Knowledge, p.104. Opposed to rethinking, unthinking as a word emphasizes that there are very deep-seated notions that, even though physical sciences have shown them to be inadequate, these notions nevertheless stay with us and lead us epistemologically astray.

Some Previous Blogspews on "Time"
History and Perception of Time: Labeling and Control
Historical Consciousness and Deep Time: A Ramble
Still Caught In Time
Five Brief Riffs On The Oddity of Time
Keeping Up To Date On Time Travel

World Book Night, 2013, Late Edition: Conspiracy Reading and Patterns

Because I'm on Pacific Standard Time, I get the news late. Let me explain international time zones to you. Some places are 15 minutes off. Others 30 minutes. If you're in Nepal you're 15 minutes behind Bangladesh, but Myanmar (Burma) is 30 minutes ahead of Bangladesh, which means if you're a major player in the Myanmar junta and want to call your friend in Nepal to say "Wassuuuuuup!?"...add 45 minutes. Which just seems Discordian to me. London is something like nine hours ahead of me; it's already tomorrow's middle-of-the-morning there "now."

Wait a minute: I can't explain that. The half-hour thing, I mean. I'm used to New York being three hours "ahead" of us. Tokyo is something like 16 ahead, so presumably they Know Things that I don't. The inscrutable, Wise East, aye. I'm not really sure how I started off on this time zone crap when the title of this blogspew was supposedly about books and conspiracy "reading and patterns." Sorry.

Anyway, from where I stand/sit, from my relative inertial position and perspective, it's still April 23, or World Book Night, which, if I can trust Wikipedia, started around 1995 in London.

Buncha do-gooders tryna get more folks to read. Okay, I admit I'm a sympathizer...

April 23 - on or about - is also the day the demonic, horrible events in the 805 page tome Illuminatus! Trilogy begin. If you haven't read that book but are thinking about starting it: don't. It screws with your mind. It most definitely wrecked me forever. I'll never be the same. Others have said very similar things. I know it's "only" a novel, but at least half of it refers to actual historical events.

Many have admired the Book for its wry satirization of conspiracy thinking. I have adopted that point of view, if only for my own sanity.

There's been a long strain in academic discourse about books belonging to one long thread of previous books. All books are in some sense a response to previous books. I like this idea a lot, although I'm not totally sold on it being "correct."

There's some interesting fancy computer research being done on "macroanalysis" of texts based on an author's word choice, style, themes, and "overarching subject matter" that suggests some interesting things about relative "originality" and the influence of a previous author, whether a writer knew they were influenced or not. See, for example, HERE.

I've made very many guesses about the influences on Shea and Wilson in the writing of their damned Illuminatus!, but I'd like to see what some future computer algorithms say about Robert Anton Wilson's influences. He's openly stated about 30 or so; what would the computer say?

Anyway, the Illuminatus! cites innumerable books - mostly ones that "actually" exist in my own phenomenological/existential sensory-sensual world in space/time. Possibly yours, too.

And today's "real world" news feels like it's been influenced by the aforementioned book. Just a sampler:

• Tamerlan Tsarnaev was an Alex Jones fan. Maybe? Quite possibly. And let's not even address the insanely delicious irony, but I'm reminded of Shea and Wilson's "Tar Baby Principle" mentioned in Illuminatus!: You will become attached to what you attack. This idea always seemed a cousin to Buddhism's "you become what you behold." But wait a minute...

          ...if Tamerlane was really influenced by - or "understood"? - Jones, he sorta horribly ironically

          got it wrong, because Jones thinks attacks blamed on Muslims are really set-ups or "false flag"     

          attacks engineered by the Evil Gummint. So...how does some pernicious idea about terrorism in 

          the name of Islamic jihad figure in? (I still see the brothers Tsarnaev as more like Harris and    

          Klebold.) 

• Glenn Beck thinks that whatever imbecilic conspiracy theory his own pea-brain imagines, it must be accepted as true unless the government can prove it's wrong. The word "thinks" in the previous sentence should be taken ironically. Of course. This is ethics, law, and logical thinking straight from the Idiot's Fun House. Lemme see if I can get on Beck's wavelength here. <Ahem> Okay: Hey, Glenn Beck? I'm not so sure that the decent real Americans haven't not negated their "misunderestimation" of you. Now: prove me wrong, or you're Evil Incarnate and I'm the True Bestest Murrkin who truly loves his country, mom, the flag, a baby's smiling face, Betty-Sue's halter top, NASCAR, and hard cider on a sweltering Missouri summer night, etcetera! <the OG wept>
• It appears as if the paranoid Elvis impersonator from Mississippi who mailed Ricin to Obama may have been framed. This seems whacked enough to have been in Illuminatus! In case you haven't been following this story (i.e, you "have a life"), the Elvis impersonator who apparently did NOT send Ricin to the POTUS did think he was trying to expose a shadowy world of human organ harvesters. I am not making this jit up.

Meanwhile, some pretty hardcore scholars see a network of global corporate control.

Professor Jennifer Whitson says, based on her research, that if we feel out of control, we will find patterns and connections and "see" things that aren't there; our brains so need to feel like things "make sense." See reportage on her findings HERE, HERE, and HERE. It's interesting stuff, and those who've read Kahneman will be familiar with this. But I'm not sure if it describes all conspiracy thought. That's far too rationalistic for me. Why? Because, well, Watergate really happened. There are conspiracy laws on the books and people go to prison for it all the time. Watergate really was a conspiracy. "Conspiracy" seems a huge semantic spook that needs some robust and fairly massive and creative intellectual work in order for us to be able to think more clearly about the concept. The idea that aliens from another planet or dimension have been controlling us for our entire history as a species ought not, it seems to me, be on an equal epistemic footing with the idea that the Neo-Cons lied Unistat into the Iraq War.

But hey, I'm biased. (And so are you.)

Does Whitson's work account for all "ritual" and "superstition" and "religion"? Maybe a lot of it, is my guess as of this date.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "Society, everywhere, is in conspiracy against the manhood of each of its members." Let's be charitable and update his 19th century assumptions to include the fairer sex. What does Emerson mean here?

In Castaways of the Image Planet, Geoffrey O'Brien writes about Fritz Lang's Spies and the 20th century mindset and logic of paranoia and conspiracies: film, the bureaucratic state, the collage-like logic of images. Those who are fans of Lang's (like me!) know he saw Osama bin Laden and Goebbels figures long before those guys were doing their schtuff. (See his Dr. Mabuse films!) Is all the "news" about secret underground terror networks and the Deep State - secret networks that operate within and outside government agencies who cooperate (at times) in order to maintain the status quo - is all this really "new"?

Would it help to stop calling some ideas "conspiracies" and start thinking of them as "normal primate-mammalian politics"?

Or, yet another of many paths to take: conceptual blending? (More serious writers on conspiracy need to become thoroughly acquainted with this idea!)

So far, the best and most underrated book by academics that takes conspiracy theories seriously as a philosophical problem - a problem of epistemology - is Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate, ed. by David Coady. (Get it via your library: that's an insane price.) Robert Anton Wilson is mentioned in there. Such problems of demarcation lines vis a vis Karl Popper! And what about the pragmatic approach?

"Any epistemological elite, religious or secular, must develop a system of cognitive defenses to defend its claims against the outside criticisms, but also, very importantly, to assuage the doubts harbored by insiders..." - Adventures of an Accidental Sociologist, by Peter Berger, pp.36-37

An academic writer with a law degree, Mark Fenster, had a hit with Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power In American Culture. So much so that he's updated it for the post 9/11 era. He's the only academic I've read that seems to understand the philosophical aspects of deep play - the ludic aspects - in Wilson's work. When citizens feel like voting isn't enough to satisfy their need to participate in the power process, they resort to conspiracy narratives as a way to participate. And largely, they draw upon popular culture's narratives, and creatively tweak and combine. Some of it should give us much cause for alarm. With further and further connections and deeper, hidden orders uncovered, there's a quite-human neurobiological buzz of adrenaline...and "wonder and awe." And let's face it: delight. Conspiracies are exciting.

"Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors...He is but a superficial thinker who would despise and refuse to hear of them merely because they are absurd." - Charles MacKay's 1852 ed. of Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

Professor Timothy Melley's Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America reminds us of Jennifer Whitson's thesis, but combines the multifarious ideas about mind control and surveillance and other aspects of "control" a citizen may feel is in the hands of Others. Melley's key term is "agency panic" and I think he was not drilling in a dry hole in that book.

"Or maybe it's the repetition. Maybe you've been looking at this stuff for so long that you've read all this into it. And talking with other people who've done the same thing." - Pattern Recognition, William Gibson, p.109

There are many other above-average, well-researched books on conspiracy thinking and paranoia. But I still see Robert Anton Wilson's oeuvre as an ideal Ground Zero for all that. Or rather: a Staging Area.

Yes, yes, yes! These books refer to other books, which refer to others ad inifinitum. Nice bibliographies. Reading about reading and interpretations about interpretations. Does something seem...missing there? Maybe?

Fiction about truth can be stranger than whatever "reality" seems. And the word is not the thing; the map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal.

Happy reading! (But you've been warned about the Illuminatus! Trilogy)

The opening 2 minutes and 17 seconds from Fritz Lang's 1928 film Spies:

This Is The Week That Is: Crazy?

Humanity: if you break it, you bought it.

Some poet wrote in some whacked long poem edited by Ezra Pound that "April is the cruellest month..." Okay, I'll bite: why?

Oh. That.

Now that Dzhokhar (friends called him "Jafar" according to some social media stuff I've seen) Tsarnaev has been apprehended - after half a state was locked down to search for an (admittedly dangerous) - badly wounded 19 year old wearing a hoodie, I was reminded that the Columbine shooting happened on 4/20 too. That's a day we should all be getting stoned LEGALLY, listening to music, talking wild speculative philosophical talk, reading poetry, and having transcendent sex.

April 20: it can be more than Hitler's Birthday and Columbine. Really.

No, but seriously: not to get all teleological on yer asses, but the goddess put cannabis there to help prevent people who'd listen to a little Loudmouth with a funny mustache...from taking him seriously. Sure, the Treaty of Versaille was a bum deal and we've dealt with an epically lousy economy, but dude! Get real. I don't like the way you say "lebensraum." You've got a malicious vibe goin' man. Chill.

Oh and the Oklahoma City bombing was on April 19th. And so was the Unistat government starting a fire and burning some religious nuts and their children alive, near Waco.

[Readers who do not live in Unistat: forgive my relatively selfish non-cosmopolitanisms here. It's a fair bet some really heinous things have happened in your neck to the planetary woods between the dates 19-25 April. For example: if you live in Rwanda I'm honored that you're even looking at this, but you must be rolling your eyes already. There are many more examples. Like this next bit.]

21 April: Nine years ago, in southern Iraq, in the place often cited as the possible "real" location for the Bible's Garden of Eden, Basra? Fallout from the Unistat war which was started under false pretenses: five suicide car bombers, in a coordinated attack, targeted police stations. 74 were killed, 160 wounded. And Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Bush...are still free men. Which I take as a very ominous existential fact.

Are there any historical forces from this week that may be working to oppose..."all that"? Aye, viz:

Earth Day is April 22nd. Albert Hofmann, one of the most brilliant chemists of the 20th century, sampled an ergot from his lab at Sandoz, thinking it a very small amount. He started to feel odd, so decided to ride his bicycle home. Turns out the lysergic acid dose he'd ingested was a very large one, for humans of any size. This bicycle ride took place on April 19th, 1943. On a human historical time scale, nuclear fission - which could eventually make ending all life on Earth possible - happened a mere few seconds from the time Hofmann accidentally discovered LSD. Coincidence?

Stewart Brand was on LSD in San Francisco, thinking about a talk Buckminster Fuller had given, about how we're all inhabitants of one spaceship: Earth. If we could only get a picture of Earth taken from space; if only people could see the Pale Blue Dot they live on, their spaceship as seen by the rest of the cosmos, maybe enough of them would think differently about their perspectives, and we could avert catastrophe.

                                                        Reminder

Brand successfully obtained that picture. It was very widely disseminated. That pic proved a major force in getting the first Earth Day going.

What is it about this week? Or am I just stoned and cherry-picking my sources? Who is the Wizard Who Makes The Cannabis Green?

If you're keeping score, here's how I've voted. How about you?

Period of the Year: one month into Spring in the No. Hemisphere, April 19-25

• Shakespeare being born on April 23: Yes
• Hitler born on the 20th: in this universe the outcome was bad: No
• Earth Day: getting in touch with everything outside your own skin, AKA "the environment": Yes
• Timothy McVeigh and the way he handled his "patriotism": No
• cannabis, celebrated on 4/20: oh hell YEA
• overkill, literally: The State burning humans alive near Waco, seemingly because their religion was weird: NO
• the Tsarnaev Bros, and the symbolic "brothers" Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Boston Marathon bombing and Columbine school shootings, respectively), and the way voters and Authority responded: I'll go No on the violence and we really need to think about the responses.
• Bicycle Day: Yes
• all the other desperate acts of violence I haven't covered here: No
• Unistat government under Neo-Cons and everyone who did their bidding in order for them get away with it, unspeakable levels of human misery and sorrow, a $3,000,000,000,000+ war (according to Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz) that was based on a series of lies: No
• Buckminster Fuller's idea that the human species needs to notice the "omnidirectional halo" and get their act together in order to not end the Human Experiment on Earth and to become a "success in universe": I'll go with Yes
• sex, music, poetry, wine, laughter, trodding more lightly on Our Spaceship: as the Poet has an emanation of the Goddess say, "yes I said yes I will Yes."

                                                        No

                                                        Yes

EXTRA CREDIT EXERCIZE:
Pick any one of the events mentioned above and, using your imagination and research (your ingenium), close your eyes and meditate on "This event happened because of this and this and this." Then think of what may have led those things to happen. Go back in time and, even though this is a "fiction" think of possible causes. If it turns out that the 1939-45 World War happened because someone wasn't getting enough love in France in 1473, so be it. Charles "The Hammer" Martel and 732 CE? Easy. If Alexander the Great hadn't sneezed in 326 BCE "all this woulddna happened"? Someone saying "knife" and someone else heard "wife" in 1608, and this led to a pogrom in Russia? Metternich felt much better that day of negotiation - no indigestion for a change - and the Cold War never would've happened? A servant girl caught a nasty bug and Henry VIII's immune system did not fight it off, and he died early on? Just think! Stranger things have happened. Maybe. Counterfactuals. But what really might have happened? If Yeltsin's and later, Putin's people advised him to just let Chechnya go to Chechen rule...do we get the Boston Marathon bombing? How and why did your parents meet? What if someone's car didn't start "that day" and they stayed home instead and watched "I Love Lucy" re-reuns? This may sound like a fruitless or even "stupid" exercize, but you may surprise yourself. Report your finding, 'cuz, like, heck, ya know? I'd like to get to the bottom of some of this stuff too.                              

Roe v. Wade and James Joyce: My Sick Lit-Drunk Meandering Mind

So I'm driving around the East San Francisco Bay on a dry, windy, cool and piercingly sunny afternoon, flipping the pre-programmed 24 radio channels and I hear a snippet about the drama of a clinic that could allow a women to exercise her right to choose under the law - an abortion - re-opening in Wichita, Kansas. Crazy, fucked-up Kansas. Poor women there. Flip the channels to find music. (Later I read up on this. Foreshadowing of synchro-mesh: the author just happens to be named Joyce.)

Hell, poor women nearly everywhere. There's a really maddening story about abortions in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by a Dr. named Kermit Gosnell. The Fetus People have made the horrors that went on in his clinic into a football in their never-ending fight against Roe.v.Wade, and as soon as I heard this I knew that, if it's this nasty and horrific it's precisely because it's become more and more difficult for women to exercise their rights...and especially difficult for impoverished women. So the Fetus People club the Pro-Choice people over the head with this quack-hack doc-monster Gosnell, but to my reading Gosnell is only a story because of the Fetus People's relentless fight to save precious life (if they have to murder doctors 'tis a small sacrifice on their part for precious Life!), for they care so much for helpless babies...(But not much at all for them after they're born. Not really. Just look at how they vote!)

I wrote about North Dakota last month, but I could've picked any number of Red States. The Fetus People are making gains in the Taker States. In case it's not clear, I'm pretty close to what Jill Filipovic writes here, on the 40th anniversary of the ruling that gave women the right to do what they wanted with their own bodies, within sane prescribed limits.

Writing about North Dakota, then hearing about Kansas, then thinking about Pennsylvania (and Arizona...), I remembered the story from last year just before Halloween, about the pretty Indian lady Savita (longlastindianname) who died of blood poisoning/infection in Ireland because she couldn't get the abortion she needed to save her life, because "Ireland is a Catholic country." I guess there has been some re-thinking on this, but the Men will probably not give in...

Joyce would've followed this story. Just look at the virtuosic performance in the "Oxen of the Sun" chapter of Ulysses. It's set in a maternity ward. (An "Oxen of the Sun" overview that makes it sound more daunting than it is.)

Then I thought of how Joyce also used, earlier in the book, the Childs fratricide case, for his own eccentric reasons. The "Childs murder case." Sounds horrific. And indeed, it evokes much of the imagery brought up by all our Roe v. Wade combatants, but especially the Fetus People's stuff.

But the Child's fratricide case was a real thing. In 1899, Samuel Childs was accused of killing his brother. In October the trial was held. Joyce, at 17, knew someone on the jury and attended the trial, no doubt taking notes. He was fascinated by the intense, mythic dimension of brother versus brother. Cain and Abel. He and his brother Stanislaus. "Shem and Shaun" in Finnegans Wake. And another few hundred examples. Joyce was endlessly interested in familial strife, infanticide, abortion, contraception, women giving birth, women's biological power...

...To add to this synchro-mesh, Childs's attorney was named Seymour Bushe. (Childs was found not guilty, by the way.)

I bet more than half of the people who read Ulysses and see the name "Seymour Bushe" assume it's this nasty, Rabelaisian Oirishman Joyce having fun making with a bad pun.

Joyce mentions Seymour Bushe nine times that I've counted. In the "Aeolus" chapter, largely in the newspaper office of the Freeman's Journal / Evening Telegraph, around noon, the newsmen and other literate types are smoking and talking of men of "forensic eloquence" from bygone days. Someone mentions Bushe:

-Bushe? the editor said. Well, yes, Bushe, yes. He has a strain of it in his blood. Kendal Bushe or I mean Seymour Bushe. 

- He would have been on the bench long ago, the professor said, only for...But no matter.

J.J. O'Molloy turned to Stephen and said quietly and slowly:
- One of the most polished periods I think I ever listened to in my life fell from the lips of Seymour Bushe. It was in that case of fratricide, the Childs murder case. Bushe defended him.

I know, I know. I'm one sick mofo. Joyce, a well-known onomast! Why, with all this real-life strife, does my mind go there?

Joyce once wrote in a letter (I forget where in my notes) that his own writing was "mosaics." And Joycean A. Walton Litz wrote that "No piece of information was too irrelevant to find its place in the comprehensive pattern."

Works Consulted:
Ulysses, James Joyce, the 1934 text as corrected and reset in 1961, Modern Library
James Joyce: A New Biography, Gordon Bowker, 2011, Farrar Straus Giroux
Art of James Joyce, A. Walton Litz, 1964, Oxford U. Press.
Names and Naming in Joyce, Claire A. Culleton, 1994, U. of Wisconsin Press

What's a Generalist Good For?

1. I spent over an hour Googling the term "generalist" and indeed I did come up with, on the first page, "a person with a wide array of knowledge, the opposite of which is a specialist." But most of the generalists now seem to be in the Information Technology field, or as medical doctors who have decided to not specialize and instead became general practitioners. Or they work in the HR field for large companies. Other generalists seem to have a wide array of knowledge in the field of architecture or social work. I saw that the famous Lloyd's of London - "the world's specialist insurance market" - sponsors a credential in a "Generalist Graduate Programme," which I assume is a field with a wide array of knowledge in insurance matters.

                                     Russell Jacoby, author of The Last Intellectuals

2. Having closely read two of the Whiz-generalists in the field of the role of intellectuals in the 20th century, Russell Jacoby and George Scialabba, the last chance a "generalist" intellectual had of making a living at it was with the New York Intellectuals. (Which I wish they'd rename the Mets, but you can't have everything.) Both guys seem to mourn the passing of them out of history and both Jacoby and Scialabba have done a good job at fleshing out a narrative about the social forces that ended the generalist run. From 1945 till about 1980 (roughly), a thinker/writer/social critic/freewheeling art historian/Marxist theorist with a deep reading of the Great Books could afford to live in Manhattan and write for little magazines, give talks, write pamphlets and books. And it's still where the big publishing houses are; people cared about ideas. (The truly maverick genes moved West to San Francisco by 1955?) The NY intellectuals were almost all Jews, finally emancipated with their resources and passions formerly fenced-in, now free to vent. They took Western philosophy and the Western "canon" and used it to critique mass culture. Many of the Frankfurt School thinkers ended up there, teaching at Columbia or the New School for Social Research. Scialabba, a big admirer of the New York intellectuals, said they threw ideas together creatively and were passionate, knew everything or at least were very good at faking knowing everything. I've read some Howe, more Sontag, lots of Trilling and MacDonald, a bit of Kazin, almost all of Mailer, and at least some from just about everyone who gets named as a player in the era in which they held sway. Leslie Fielder and Paul Goodman had some amazing moments, to my mind. If you look at the hypertexted list in the Wiki, notice that the earliest movers and legitimators for the Neo Cons are there, too. (How this happened: that well-educated and prolific, formerly Trotsky-ish Jewish writers became the "braintrust" for the worst of Unistat Right Wing thought, is covered pretty well in a documentary film called Arguing The World.) I think it was Irving Howe who called his group, the New York Intellectuals, "luftmenschen of the mind." My favorite definition of luftmensch is "an impractical contemplative person having no definite business or income." But they did make at least some bank with their brains in that bygone era.

                                    Irving Howe, published a terrific essay on his own

                                    tribe, the so-called "New York intellectuals," I forget

                                        where.

3. Forces that ended the generalist intellectual's run: late 19th/early 20th century technology. It called for a strong mass education, which is a problem for the 1%, because with enough education, a significant number of the newly educated will learn to ask barbed questions about power, legitimate authority, privilege. This was a problem. Formerly, as either Scialabba or Jacoby (or was it Alvin Gouldner? Rorty?), you only needed a good ear for bullshit and then you exposed it. Think of Mark Twain or William James. When the government or banks or large corporations told the press their story and the press printed it, the smart set called them out on their bovine excreta. The ruling class then invented and deployed "expertise." And (hold your nose), "Public Relations." Using a term that I wish would catch on, Scialabba said the ruling class, who formerly sent their sons out to tell the press what they were up to, now hired "anti-public intellectuals." If you're a Chomsky reader, this is basically the same as his "commissar class" or "Mandarins." The anti-public intellectuals were experts in legitimation. They had advanced degrees from our finest schools. They truly knew. Hey, the social world had developed technologies and bureaucracies and machinations that truly did seem dazzlingly complex. Who could possibly know? Well, the New York intellectuals read up on business and finance and US foreign policy and advertising and still called the Official Edicts bullshit, but the corporate media seemed mighty impressed with people like MacGeorge Bundy and Henry Kissinger. They seemed to truly know this deep mysterious stuff; they have degrees, and besides, they're so readily made available to us. What could Mailer - a novelist! - possibly know about it? Best to ignore these...poets and philosophers, with regards to the Vietnam War/Cold War/"democracy." What could you possibly know about Unistat foreign policy with your Humanities degree? (It turns out you can see through the anti-public intellectuals' rhetoric even without a degree of any kind, but I'll leave that for another time.)

                                                      George Scialabba

4. Scialabba says it then took "investigative journalists" to put the anti-public intellectuals in check. People like I.F. Stone, Sy Hersh, Glenn Greenwald. Or: academics who were mavericks and were willing to answer "expertise" with another sort of "expertise" and a willingness to spend a lot of time doing deep studies, in the archives. These would be people like Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Barbara Ehrenreich, Peter Dale Scott, J.K.Galbraith, William Appleman Williams, Christopher Lasch. 

But mostly, the media were taken by the anti-public intellectuals. To me, the most telling fact here is the virtual absence of Chomsky - in the Top Ten most-cited thinkers of all time - in Unistat corporate media. 

5. I enjoy and admire Jacoby and Scialabba a lot, but they seem far too enamored with what I'll call the New York caste of mind. They seem to not want to deal with that other part of the New Class that Gouldner wrote about, the technical intelligentsia. Oh, they touch on it. Scialabba thinks specialization in the sciences is a sign of true progress, and that in a little over 100 years, an accomplished person in any field of the physical sciences could pretty much know the entire field, but now when you specialize - in some area of cognitive science or molecular biology or math or physics or organic chemistry - you can't possibly keep up with everything that's going on. And this is true progress. I agree with Scialabba.  But the nature of McLuhan's re-tribalized mind via all our digital whiz-bangs makes his point something tangential. A chasm has opened up, and readers of Austen and Proust who study the esthetics of John Ruskin and link "Breaking Bad" to Auden or 9/11 or de Quincey in passing conversation? They will not rescue us. (But I'm glad some exist!)

We are not so much Gutenberg Man anymore. McLuhan predicted this and knew he wouldn't like it; Scialabba, Jacoby, Nicholas Carr, Sven Birkerts, Morris Berman and many others do not like it, but they are searching for a way out...

                                           Christopher Lasch, an anti-modern

                                            that both Jacoby and Scialabba admire

6. Academia has become increasingly market-driven. It's beholden to business interests or it's run by business people themselves. And in the non-physical sciences this seems to have contributed to a lot of insularity and impenetrable language. If you seem innovative and novel with some critical theory of society or a way to interpret literature or history, hey, it's attractive...to the wrong people. My gawd, look at the language used when the Humanities in Unistat became enamored of French post-structuralists. How did this "innovation" help society? I think it was a backward move. It was faux innovation, for the most part. With some exceptions. A lucid and intellectually interesting Third Culture writer, Steven Johnson, majored in Semiotics at Brown and he wrote a blog post about how infected his writing had become at the age of 19. I've experienced the same thing, reading Derrida and Lyotard and Foucault and Frederic Jameson. Hell, even Adorno. Don't even start me on Judith Butler. That stuff warps your style, and your style seems like a big part of your "mind." What's all that about? How the French Academy works? The resultant of what was once called "Physics Envy"?

7. I used the term "Third Culture" above. I used to blog about it, e.g, HERE. Scialabba and Jacoby seem so utterly taken by the Humanities as the true land of the generalist intellectual that they barely, if ever, even acknowledge this new type of thinker/writer, and it seems a main reason why they both feel too mired in a New York/Harvard cognitive style. I like both guys a lot, let me reiterate. Especially Scialabba (who I found out is a depressed guy who thought about suicide, which really bummed me out because I really love guys like him: he's a long-time office-worker at Harvard who manages to write better than most of the professors at Harvard and he's like Sven Birkerts: both guys seem to have a wealth of things to say about the phenomenology of reading), but I do think they make a good, hard case for "their" intellectuals. Read both guys! (But the Third Culture writers seem to have won. As of today. Anyway...)

8. My favorite writers and intellectuals are generalists/polymathic types who seem nowheres near the radar screens of Jacoby or Scialabba (<----btw, say something like "shuh-LAH-buh"), probably because my squeezes seem too frankly interested in the academically declasse: the semantic unconscious, mind-expanding drugs, Eastern religious ideas and techniques, "underground" knowledge and societies, tricksterism and irreverence, the frontiers, hacking, the cutting edges of science, science fiction, sex, the speculative mind untethered, High Weirdness, and, at times, an utter contempt for Authority of any kind. As far as generalists go, this is a different breed of cat. They're hermetic and/or Dionysian with an information density that tends to be very high; they're heretical and offensive. Some have written eccentric quasi-encyclopedias. Many have stupendous and compendious minds. A few might have some of those genes expressed that cash out as schizoid or histrionic, manic or alcoholic, and a few seem given to expansive, even grandiose states. Quite a few were just bats. They're weird. Maybe they constitute a Fourth Culture, but I prefer to think of them as Ecstatics and Gnostics and Tricksters who happen to write books.

Although this may seem like a brief, almost occult statement, they all articulate the dimethyltryptamine aspect of basic human neurobiology.

(There are also some quite "straight" writers/thinkers that put me in a psychedelic head space. I always imagine that, were I to tell George Lakoff that his books were so stimulating to me they made me feel stoned and filled with wonder, he'd somehow not appreciate hearing this. But it's true.)

                                 John Lilly, an example of my favorite kind of intellectual

9. Given the $1,000,000,000,000 student loan bubble right now, the greatly watered-down quality of what constitutes the "university experience" these days (not for all, just most), and the evaporation of real jobs to pay for real rent, real food, real health care, and something like a maintenance of "sanity," I really do not know what a "generalist" (in the sense that the New York Intellectuals were) is good for these days. Anyone got a line on this?

10. Out of the mouths of Google employees: when in the course of doing an exploratory search for "generalist" (see #1, above), I stumbled upon the blog of one Tomasz Tunguz, who gives a quote from Management Guru-Wiz Peter Drucker on the idea of a "generalist": "The only meaningful definition of a 'generalist' is a specialist who can relate his own small area to the universe of knowledge."

As much as this smarts, it seems, in my experience, only too-true. To paraphrase Brando from On the Waterfront, "I couldda been somebody. I couldda been a specialist!" (I couldda learned to write code like a bad mutha while reading Ulysses and books on quantum mechanics in my spare time?)

What are generalists good for? Could we replace Edwin Starr's "War" with "Generalist" and come up with the same answer? 

Insect Imagery In Kafka, Pound and Burroughs

A Jungian psychoanalytic riff that, to me, feels intuitively right (<----A-HAAA!) is that, if we see insects as mindless robotic beings, generating at a cartoonishly fast rate relative to our own generations, we probably subconsciously see the Six-Legged Majority as a force or threat to our reason. We seem to have some predilection for Mind, what we think Minds ought to be.

On good days - most days - I'm mesmerized by the variety and intricacies of insect life, morphology, and their modes of making their ways. I enjoy entertaining the thought that that insect there, the one over your shoulder and near the drapes? He's of some sort of Alien Mind. I mean, just look at Him.

[At this point I'd like to interrupt for a commercial and tell you good folks about James K. Wangberg's book Six-Legged Sex: The Erotic Life of Bugs, copiously and deviously illustrated by Marjorie C. Leggitt. It'll easily make it into your Top Ten books of the year 2013 to feature actual science with chapters like "Bug Bondage and Insect S&M" (chapter 18) or "Insect Sex Hangouts" (chapter 8), all featuring the coincidentally-named Leggitt's illustrations. Top 10, easy. Sure to start conversation as a coffee table book, the cover alone worth the price of admission. And I do not receive a kickback from Amazon, where most of our favorite bugs live. I'm plugging this book simply for Art's Sake. Back to our show.]

I think it was JBS Haldane the great English intellectual and geneticist who, when asked about God and nature and creation, said that if there is a God, He seems to have an inordinate fondness for stars and beetles. There are an enormous number of beetles in the world, indeed. (Aldous Huxley knew Haldane; Haldane's ideas about eugenics influenced Brave New World, and in Aldous's early 1920s novel of ideas, Antic Hay, a character modeled on Haldane is too wrapped up in his biology studies to notice his friends are fucking his wife, but there's my digression...)

Kafka
Regarding the idea of insects overtaking ourselves and the works of Kafka, I will simply submit your own reading(s) of The Metamorphosis. While I nominate Joyce as the greatest novelist of the 20th century, arguably Kafka captured the tenor of the century better: modernist society, the machinery and bureaucracy of everyday life, the Authoritarian State, the sociobiological anthill of overpopulated cities and your number tagged to your name. It speaks to the absurdity of everyday life in the 20th century up to, oh, at least April of 2013. Inadequacy, guilt, glaring inequality, alienation, isolation, anxiety. Knowledge of genocide and the atomizing threat of human extinction due to squabbles over territory, material, and ideology. (All of this - Kafka - informs the deep structure of film noir too, but I can't get into it here, now...)

From the cognitive science/psycholinguistics and the-primary-mode-of-communication-is-as-metaphor POV: in the bureaucratic State, I feel as if I'm a bug that can be squashed, at any minute, unannounced, for any "reason."

Why does Kafka have Gregor Samsa wake up as a giant bug? Could it be he intuited the threat to his own sense of rationality versus what a monolithic State seemed to have in mind? Well, yes, but Franz's father was fairly brutal, and Kafka wasn't sure if his identity was as a Jew, a German, or a Czech. But he does seems to see fascism coming...in 1915? (This riff on insects and great writers seems to lend another level of meaning to Ezra Pound's "artist" being "the antenna of the race.")

Pound
Speaking of Pound, in Cantos XIV and XV, his Dantean "Hell" Cantos, we see imagery of politicians:

      Addressing crowds through their arse-holes, 
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
                newts, water-slugs, water-maggots

[I'd like to add as a gratuity, war profiteers and bankers "drinking blood sweetened with shit/And behind them [...] the financiers lashing them with steel wires."]

More insect imagery, and need I exhort you to NB the context?:

The petrified turd that was Verres
              bigots, Calvin and St. Clement of Alexandria!
black-beetles, burrowing into the shit, 
The soil a decrepitude, the ooze full of morsels

Ain't life grand? But wait! There's more:

Ez is really letting London have it ("The great arse-hole/broken with piles/hanging stalactites/greasy as sky over Westminster"), after WWI, in Canto 14, and in the midst of a blast of righteous vituperation:

malevolent stupidities, and stupidities, 
the soil living pus, full of vermin, 
dead maggots begetting live maggots, 
               slum-owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice, pandars to authority

WHO is Pound putting in these delightful hellholes? Bankers, war-profiteers, politicians, journalists who repeat State propaganda, and anyone who obstructs the free flow of vital knowledge. There's more, and I'll quote this snippet because it shows how Burroughs really was influenced by Pound, something that's not often noted, though WSB said in more than a couple places that Ez influenced him:

          And Invidia,
the corruptio, foetor, fungus,
liquid animals, melted ossifications,
slow rot, foetid combustion,
        chewed cigar butts, without dignity, without tragedy,
. . . . .m Episcopus, waving a condom full of black-beetles, 
monopolists, obstructors of knowledge, 
               obstructors of distribution.

And that's just Canto XIV. I think the condom full of black beetles proto-Burroughs. It shows up again - as if a "cut-up" reinserted? - in Canto XV. I have not checked to see if some hot heavy metal band has taken to calling themselves "Liquid Animals," but if not, it's not too late! And "Invidia" in Latin means envy or jealousy, but here it appears as a malevolent, demonic force or Spawn of the Demiurge.

In Canto XV Ez really lets loose. We get the usual flies and maggots, but now the ruling class and their lackeys are deep in the shit, face-down, money-grubbing in the farting ooze, but they themselves appear insectoid, "all with their twitching backs/with daggers and bottle ends/waiting an unguarded moment."

For the possibly uninitiated: Pound had declared he intended to cause a revolution in art, poetry and aesthetics. And some of his best revolutionary-artist friends died in the War of 1914-1918. He has a right to be pissed to this level, eh?

To contrast Kafka with Pound seems too easy, but Pound's insectoid imagery accompanies natural habitats for insects: hovering on, in or around human- caused Decay brought on by, among other things, Greed. With neither Pound nor Kafka do we get a sense they consciously loathe insects. Let us say each uses insectoid imagery as a concomitant to the projection of their feelings of fear and loathing over the state of things after the period often referred to as "World War I," but which I think of as The Period of World War from 1914 to 1918; there's been nothing but wars ever since, and I wish Steven Pinker would pay more attention to his teacher Chomsky's political writings and less on his linguistics...

Two Popular Scientific Sources of Early 20th C. Insect Imagery: Haeckel and Fabre
Ernst Haeckel died in 1919. He knew Darwin. He was a very Germanic professor (there is a unity to all living things), a physician, an embryologist ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny"), and just a jaw-droppingly great artist. I marvel at his drawings of tiny living things. Check out his Art Forms In Nature; it's one of my favorite Art books: psychedelic and accurate, beautiful and intellectually provoking. I love looking at it when I'm stoned. No doubt many 20th century writers saw Haeckel's work and were inspired. It's easy to imagine the French filmmakers Nuridsany and Perennou (see 1996's Microcosmos!)(trailer HERE) were steeped in their Haeckel. But also: Jean-Henri Fabre. He died in 1915, and Darwin admired his work, although Fabre was an early French thinker against theory, and check out his "A Dig At the Evolutionists," chapter viii from his book More Hunting Wasps. (The translation by Alexander Teixeira De Mattos, F.Z.S. seems utterly fantabulous to me: fans of Joyce and Nabokov and Stevens? check out that short Chapter 8, "A Dig At The Evolutionists.") Also see the list of scanned materials in that Wiki article. Fabre etait un virtuose merveilleux!

Burroughs
Insect imagery runs through much of WSB's massive oeuvre, but if you've only seen Cronenberg's celluloid interpretation of Naked Lunch you might get the feeling Burroughs was obsessed with insects. He wasn't. But like Kafka and Pound in their own ways, insects seem aligned or contributive to: Control, Authority and State Power. Oddly: State Power and Control are theorized by Frankfurt School types as fatally in thrall to overweening instrumental rationality - techne without telos - simply "more and better" for its own sake, without "human" values as much of a consideration; for Burroughs, Pound and Kafka, insects - as non-humanly non-rational as any of the creatures on the planet? - represent a rationality that has completely transcended the values of the individual as subject within the Modern State apparatus. Human warmth, love, patience, nurture - the Divine Feminine - seem an antithesis to Instrumental Rationality...although with Burroughs's well-known misogyny, he obviously represents a slightly different case.

In Naked Lunch an agent wonders who another agent is working for: it could be for similar people as himself, or "It is rumored that he represents a trust of giant insects from another galaxy." Here insects literally function as ETs. But a more common Burroughsian insect trope is insects as instrumental rationalists with no regard for any human values. And let's hone in further: WSB had some major suspicions about the wielding of Power by the AMA and the modern Western medical establishment in general. Here's an appropriately phantasmagorical passage from Naked Lunch before I hightail it outta here for some of majoun's popular accomplices:

Doctor "Fingers" Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid, rises and turns on the Conferents his cold blue blast of this gaze:

"Gentlemen, the human nervous system can be reduced to a compact and abbreviated spinal column. The brain, front, middle and rear must follow the adenoid, the wisdom tooth, the appendix...I give you my Master Work: The Complete All-American Deanxietized Man...

Blast of trumpets: The Man is carried in naked by two Negro Bearers who drop him on the platform with bestial, sneering brutality...The Man wriggles...His flesh turns to viscid, transparent jelly that drifts away in green mist, unveiling a monster black centipede. Waves of unknown stench fill the room, searing the lungs, grabbing the stomach. -p.87

I feel compelled to add that Allen Ginsberg's testimony about Burroughs - that he was a satirist on par with Swift - is something I agree with on one major level. So here I'd like The Reader to also consider the comedic aspect of such a passage as rhetoric about the elements of Control that WSB did indeed seem menaced by, but at other times he simply seems to be the proto-punk artist-intellectual and heir to part of a fortune, sneering derisively. Burroughs at one time trained towards the M.D, but his homosexuality was officially a "sick" existential mental state to the State. And yes, he was a heroin addict, and his family was well-off. We're interested (just a little bit?) in insect imagery in three of the great figures of Modernism.

Were Kafka, Pound and Burroughs paranoid weirdos? Of course. But so am I. Why else am I sitting here, seeming to argue their cases?

Here's a bit from a 1970s "documentary" that wants to argue that insects will inherit the Earth. Anyone remember The Hellstrom Chronicle? It's campy and sorta shrill and won the Oscar. (Watch Microcosmos first?)