Promiscuous Neurotheologist, vol. 6 or 7-ish: Alan Watts

My brother has a Theology degree and seems so much more sophisticated about Christiantity than I am that I will always defer to his statements on any subject within that realm.

There was a time when we disagreed so strikingly about this version of the monotheisms that I'd end up being a wise-ass jerk and he'd get sick of even trying to talk to me. Things have gotten wildly better since then, thank-Goddess.

His interpretation of Christianity has evolved. I think in the Darwinian sense of "evolve": not toward some Ultimate Form, but simply: cybernetic feedback from society/continuous thinking about his faith/exposure to evermore innovative and nuanced thinkers/and an active neuroplasticity, all of this from within an ecological niche of politics, economics, and other factors. He has an open mind, and it's capacious.

As I perceive it, his faith (as some of you may know, my only faith is in some sort of change) seems avant-Left, and I never see or even hear Christians in electronic corporate media who sound like him: not on radio, or TV, or even in film. Suffice: even if you're an atheist, you might not be aware of the very many varieties of interpretations of Christianity out there, now. His - if indeed he still even categorizes himself as "Christian" - is marked by compassion for the poor, the sick, and anyone downtrodden. He renders unto Caesar what's Caesar's, and it's a nuisance. He's accepting of gays, muslims...anyone that might get picked on in today's Unistat. He's in this world and is a sensualist, with the most sophisticated beer palate I've ever known, and an inscrutably detailed sense of guitar-sound textures. There's a pained sense of alienation from previous allies and alliances in Christian faith, and, because he doesn't evangelize at all, I must infer many of his intellectual and emotional stances toward aspects of the Transcendent, much like an astrophysicist infers there must be moons around a recently detected exoplanet: secondary effects. People who constantly talk about their religion? We've all known one or a few. Those who we know have very deep, nuanced and extensive knowledge of a certain religion but hardly ever talk about it? These people will interest us, no?

                                       Alan Watts: artwork by Randal Roberts

So, his birthday comes along and I didn't know what to get him, so I thought of my favorite theology book, The Wisdom of Insecurity, by Alan Watts, which came out in 1951. I hope to learn something from my brother's comments, if he offers them. (He emailed me after receiving the book in the mail, "I hardly know anything about Buddhism. Cool!")

I read Watts's book every few years and it always seems "new" to me, although the part that seems "old" is the basic message: sciences are about knowledge of the past - observations and experiments - and its ability to predict the future; but "now" - this very moment - is religious, and we aren't in the now if we're thinking about being in the now. The core of true religion is experience, not citing chapter and verse. We know we've recently been in the moment, but now that we're thinking about that, we're probably not in It. The key is to just be in the moment. Watts never totally lets on, but this is stealth-zen. I love the idea of always being in the moment, but find it very difficult to accomplish.

(I find the idea of laughing at the idea that you're not in the moment precisely because you're thinking about "being in the moment" hilarious, and so: being-in-the-moment.)

And if you "try" that's not going to work. Trying seems one of the most counterproductive things to do if you want to be in my moment: 'tis far better to just go ahead and do or be.

As readers of the OG know: I have pronounced neurotic tendencies. Which have to do with worry (living in the future) and some regret (living in the past).

Still: I'm sure this book has somehow allowed me to have a higher quantity of "moments." Or at least it seems so. The book does seem to function reliably - por moi - as a short-term anti-anxiety Pill. The endgame (<---Ha!) does seem to set the bar fairly high, though. Which is cool...

It occurs to me that in our non-ordinary "realities" we seem to be more conducive to being-in-the-moment, possibly because our primary realities seem a tad too "well-known"?

It's for me an uncanny book: as I read it, I think, "Alan Watts is right about all this...how did he do it? How does he make it all sound so logically coherent?" (An olde classic: Wordworth's "The World Is Too Much With Us")

I also find myself thinking "This is one of the best Sophists ever," and I actually enjoy most of the Sophists we encounter in Plato. (Forget Thrasymachus, who seems to me the barking Id of every Pentagon Death Cult thinker we've ever had. Add to this "might makes right" dude: Callicles and Hippias. What a trio of a-holes.)

I know when we read Plato we're always supposed to be on Socrates's side, and I love the old pederast as much as the next Philosophy student, but some of his interlocutors are even more interesting. Gorgias the rhetorician must have seemed like a whigged-out weirdo thinker in his time, but he probably ends up as an underrated progenitor of trippy Neoplatonism. A case has been made that Gorgias is proto-Derrida.

Protagoras was the Clarence Darrow of his day: he said there's gotta be at least two versions of everything, and was really good at making the weaker account sound better than the stronger; he also said: you can have the gods, but I say they're unknowable and furthermore: humans are the measure of all things. Antiphon reminds me of a billionaire libertarian who wants unlimited pleasure, life, comfort...and pesky laws and other people's meddling just get in his way. Antiphon thought Protagoras was a dick. I don't like this Antiphon guy very much, but he's not boring and I feel like I know him: Antiphon Lives!

Socrates quite often pales (according to my own evaluations) when engaged in dialectic with these rock-star talkers and thinkers in Athens. Anyway...

Back to Alan Watts's The Wisdom of Insecurity: it's also Beatnik philosophy nonpareil. Watts was doing what Aldous Huxley was doing for open-minded Protestant and quasi-lapsed Catholic thinkers in the West at the time: arguing point after metaphysical point and then citing passages from the Bible juxtaposed with quotes from Buddhism, Taoism, and the Vedas and showing how much they had in common. That Old-Time Human Ecumenism. I go for that, as a person who really never went to church. I strongly suspect even the most rabid atheists out there desire transcendent experience. (Hell: I know they do.)

Watts has also always seemed fantastically entertaining to me: playful Trickster-Guru, erudite, absurd, wonderfully frank, heretical. With marvelous British elocution. This might be the key to a good theologian in the 21st century ("good" according to my own hierarchy of values): be a philosophical entertainer. (Aye: Philosophers could stand to be more "entertaining." Or, failing that, at least drop most of the post-1945 jargon. It's decadent!) Here's a decent line I just found in Watts's essay, "Psychotherapy and Eastern Religion":

Now, I'm a philosopher, and as a philosopher I am grateful to some of the great pioneers in psychotherapy like Freud, Jung and Adler for pointing out to us philosophers the unconscious emotional forces which underlie our opinions. In a way, I'm also a theologian, but not a partisan theologian. I don't belong to any particular religion because I don't consider that to be intellectually respectable.

20 years ago, when I read that, I realized, "Okay, I previously discounted all theologians as pernicious dinosaurs, but I must consider any that say such a thing as this!"

Later, when I stumbled onto my favorite writer, Robert Anton Wilson, I found that RAW's wife Arlen had turned him onto Watts. In turn, Watts became a sort of mentor to Wilson, telling him there were some very interesting Harvard professors investigating psychedelic drugs in the context of religious experience. (RAW and Leary became friends and intellectual collaborators from the mid-1960s to Leary's death in 1996.) At another meeting, Watts told RAW he'd just read a fantastic book by Israel Regardie, about Aleister Crowley. RAW went on to become one of the world's most erudite explainers of Crowley, and indeed an Adept himself. At another time, Watts said that the biggest error in history books is the idea that the Roman Empire "fell." It never ended. This became a riff repeated in RAW's and Philip K. Dick's books. Watts turned RAW on to zen, and even though Watts quit smoking cannabis by 1959, the notion of zen and being awake in-the-moment has always struck many of us lovers of Mary Jane Warner as an easy way in to a simulation of zen...for reasons I'll go into in some further blogspew...

Watts was alcoholic and a sensualist. He was an ordained Anglican priest, taught at Harvard, was an editor, broadcaster, a dean, a consultant at psychiatric hospitals, and one of the West's great exponents of Comparative Religion. He wrote one of the first books on psychedelics and religion, The Joyous Cosmology. By late 1959/early 1960s he'd found his calling as self-described "philosopher-entertainer," a religious virtuoso who was "in show biz" and was a "genuine fake." When RAW met him, Watts had left his wife Dorothy and their four kids, with a fifth on the way. He was not perfect.

I remember a talk Watts gave on Pacifica Radio in which he said the numbers for outcomes in traditional psychotherapy were: 1/3 get get better, 1/3 get worse, and 1/3 stay the same. That floored me. He foresaw a "Zerowork" society as far back as the 1950s. He was very well-read in the sciences, and in one of the few quotations from The Wisdom of Insecurity we get, in a footnote, a quote from the uber-cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, who seemed to be aware that our rationality and machines might kill us...in a book from 1951.

He was friends with Huxley and an influence on Leary. All three of those men and Wilson influenced me to learn to use my own brain, to think for myself, to acknowledge that I might be one of those weirdo-thinkers who may have to do it outside of The Academy. Against "rugged" American egotist individualism, we as a culture need as complement: transpersonal intersubjectivity and a non-intellectual public meeting of limbic minds.

Watts's most famous abode was probably his houseboat at Sausalito just north of San Francisco. It was on his boat that a much-written-about meeting ("Houseboat Summit"of 1967) of 1960s guru-minds was held. The problem? Do we forget about politics - because it's hopeless - and "drop out" and continue to "turn on" to our own thing? Or do we engage in politics, trying to bring what we've learned from esoterica and psychedelia to the table? Or something in-between? On the boat that day: Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Leary. In this same year, Watts began championing Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. The Summer of Love was happening (or is it capital aitch Happening?) a few minutes down the way, in the Haight-Ashbury district.

In his Introduction to Dark Destiny: Proprietors of Fate, a book of short stories about the "world of darkness" which is an apt title to happen upon as I write this, nearing the Witching Hour on Halloween, RAW, in an eldritch mood, writes:

Emerson's Brahma, who says"I am the slayer and the slain," presumably enjoys the slaying even if He-She-It also suffers the pain of the victim. This view really implies a cosmos consisting only of a god playing with itself (Transcendental Masturbation) or playing hide-and-seek with itself (the view of Alan Watts and all Gnostic conspiracy buffs in the Phil Dick tradition). 

When I first read this passage, I had never thought Watts a gnostic, but then realized: that's probably right. The idea that Rome never fell seems one of the main riffs in modern gnosticism. Further: one easily gets the feeling, reading or listening to Watts, that he had "sight of Proteus rising from the sea." And besides: RAW knew Alan Watts.

                                                  कलाकार: बॉब कैम्पबेल

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? 

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

William S. Burroughs and Giambattista Vico on Immortality, and Other Ragtag Observations on Death

First: A Gnostic: Simon Magus
In Jacques Lacarriere's little gem of a book, The Gnostics, he's discussing the diffusion of gnostic ideas "along the great routes of the Orient," on "the road to Samaria," and the wonderfully odd figure of Simon Magus, one of history's uber-heretics. His ideas contradicted the ideas of the Apostles quite radically. For what would turn out to be the orthodox view, the Apostles said a human's soul is immortal, no matter what he or she does; we are all condemned for eternity to burnish or tarnish that soul, know the depths of hell, or paradisical delights. Simon preached, or railed rather thus: We all have a fragment of God in us. We are special creatures because, for example, we can use language and reason. But these are potentialities, not eternal. We must use it or lose it. (In the 20th century, we found that if a child was not exposed to any language by age seven or so, their brain's innate language acquisitive feature soon dissipates. And who really "reasons" much even these days?) Simon says: we have the capacity for speech, grammar, and geometry...but it's up to use to seize the day and work that stuff, get really good at it. The point is: we have the capacity. Simon seemed to think we also had the capacity for immortality, but time's a wastin': let's get to it, figure it out...

We must cultivate an attitude towards our aptitudes. That spark of he Divine in us is not eternal. It can only become eternal if we feed that spark, make it into a fire. Otherwise, we revert to nothingness.

And here's how the eloquent Lacarriere unpacks Simon Magus's heretical view of immortality: "For the gnostic, the die is cast, here, before death. (No wonder Simon Magus was hated by the orthodox! - the OG) Which is why he feels this sense of anguish in the face of time and the brevity of the human span, a feeling that is so characteristic of the Gnostic sensibility, and one which is only remotely related to the melancholy Jeremiads of the poets who lament the passing of the days: every moment of our lives is counted, for each is a door opening on to immortality or the void." (p.49)

Another gnostic heretic, Valentinus, is quoted: "Make death die."

It is because of the Gnostics, the Sufis, the Taoists, much of Buddhism, some mystical Judaism, and some Hinduism and certain Christian mystics that I find a line of the so-called "new atheism" interesting, and that line says something like, "Religion is too important to be left to the believers, the faithful." See Alain de Botton's views in this article, which also mentions Nassim Taleb.

It would seem the Extropian/Transhumanist manifestoes echo certain things some gnostic sects were already groping towards, in the first two centuries of the Common Era.

A Quick Thought and/or Inchoate Koan
Let's say the worldwide army of scientists working on the Death Problem solve it. A few huge key findings fall into place, the rest is like knocking over dominoes, and WHAM!: we've got immortality. Is this something like Sisyphus pushing his stone all the way to the top of the mountain, and over the edge, finally, wiping his hands and going home?

Burroughs and Vico
After Norman Mailer published his book Ancient Evenings, Burroughs, from roughly 1972 till death, showed a Mailer influence with an Egyptian-based death as mythic antagonist, which comes out in unique Burroughsian full-force with his use of the "seven souls" one has and must deal with correctly in the afterlife, largely derived ultimately from The Egyptian Book of the Dead. Here, have a listen to Ol' Bill reading from his novel The Western Lands, accompanied by the fantastic electronic-world music of Bill Laswell's band Material:

Here's the lyrics as WSB reads them; he added a few bits here and there as improv, like "Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama." I confess the first time I heard this piece I went into an altered state, and when WSB says the first three souls are immortal and go back to heaven for another vessel, but the last four souls must "take their chances with the subject in the land of the dead," I was floored. O! The primal poetry of it all!

My blogging colleague Oz Fritz is all over this soul-after-death bardo trip, and I eagerly refer to his recent post HERE.

Throughout Burroughs's dazzling oeuvre, there's an obvious obsession with memory and vital, sexual young men (some of this for obvious reasons); but he also liked to remember himself as young and vital when he was an old man. He thought and wrote about death in ways that few of the candidates for Great American Novelist did. And apparently, from at least around the time of the appearance of the book that would make him famous, Naked Lunch, in 1959, he'd dreamed about afterlives. Personally, I do not think much about an afterlife, possibly because of my overweening materialism and non-religiosity. But I'm fascinated by what cultural anthropologists have told us about the various beliefs about death. Someone once said, "We are all greater artists than we realize." When it comes to religious ideas about life and death I see them as sort of collective artworks, and who knows? Maybe I'm just lacking imagination, and some of these ideas are "right"? How hilarious! How ironic! How...marvelous to contemplate.

Back to Burroughs.

In his book from 1995, (he died in 1997), My Education: A Book of Dreams, WSB recalls a dream he'd had right after Naked Lunch was published:

Airport. Like a high school play, attempting to convey a spectral atmosphere. One desk onstage, a gray woman behind the desk with the cold waxen face of the intergalactic bureaucrat. She is dressed in a gray-blue uniform. Airport sounds from a distance, blurred, incomprehensible, then suddenly loud and clear. "Flight sixty-nine has been----" Static... Fades into the distance... "Flight..."


Standing to one side of the desk are three men, grinning with joy at their prospective destinations. When I present myself at the desk, the woman says: "You haven't had your education yet." 


The semantics of "education" seem vital here: by 1959 WSB had long dropped out of Harvard, where he studied medicine and anthropology, and had travelled and written a couple of novels and many later-to-be-published letters of literary delight to weirdos like myself. Aside from formal education, he had earlier astonished young Ginsberg and Kerouac with his erudition, and shaped their thinking - and other notable "Beat" types - mostly via his learning of Arcane Things and WSB's spectral presentation of himself. It's easy (and valid, methinks) to surmise the dream's semantics of education had to do with imagination/narrative/tapping into post-terrestrial circuits of brain/magick/experimentation.

It was much later that WSB began to concentrate on the cosmi-comic high drama of Death as the Adversary, like a character in multifaceted forms. And he drew from many sources regarding this, not just the Egyptians. Emotionally, a very strong actuating force for his thoughts about death had to do with his beloved cats. I recall reading once - I forget where - that Burroughs thought nuclear annihilation would be particularly horrible because then his cats would die.

(At this point in my rambling little blogspew I'm quite tempted to link to articles on cats and taxoplasmosis and its potential to make humans quite a bit odder than they would've been, if only for the irony of someone I thought was maybe Unistat's greatest writer during the second half of the 20th century, and who used the metaphor of language-as-virus extensively, but I will just link this and you go ahead and make of it what you will. Hmmm...Ezra Pound loved cats too, feeding them all over Rapallo...)

Yes, but what about Vico? He had something to say about immortality and the afterlife too? Of course he did.

Vico thought a looming large and distinctive feature of human law, as opposed to natural law, was that we humans bury our dead. And with ceremony. (We have good reason to believe Neanderthals did too, but there was no way Vico could've been on to that.)

Vico:


Let us imagine a brutish state in which human corpses are left unburied as carrion for crows and dogs. Such bestial behavior clearly belongs to the world of uncultivated fields and uninhabited cities, in which people wandered like swine, eating acorns amid the rotting corpses of their dead kin. This is why burials were rightly defined in a lofty Latin phrase as "the covenants of the human race," foedera humani generis, and were characterized less grandly by Tacitus as "exchanges of humanity," humanitatis commercia."

Then Vico enumerates many books he's had the privilege to get hold of, about peoples from far-flung areas of the world. What all these books prove is that "all pagan nations clearly agree in the view that the souls of the unburied remain restless on the earth and wander around their corpses: which is to say, souls do not die with their bodies but are immortal." Vico doesn't have much at all to say about what happens to anyone's soul after death. But I do like his proto-ghost/zombie vision idea. I like it in the same way Burroughs talks about the at-times treacherous roads to the Western Lands. I don't "believe" it, but it makes for tremendous poetry.

The end of the section of The New Science in which Vico here discusses burial as a human law, culminates with this quote from Seneca:

"When we discuss immortality, we must grant considerable importance to the consensus of humankind, who either fear or worship the spirits of the underworld. I follow this general belief." (section #337)

Nietzsche On This Topic...
...Seems to lead us by some sort of circumambient commodius vicus of recirculation to Nietzsche's The Antichrist, and back to a quasi-Simon Magus-like gnostic view. In section #58, Fred N. rails against the quasi-Neoplatonic "life is better up there" crowd, where the real immortality lies. For these weak, unimaginative folk, the Good Life is to be found after death. And before orthodox Christianity became the master of Rome, Epicurus had already battled against these types. I will leave it to the better minds who know the gnostics (such as Simon Magus) and Nietzsche to say just where and how they diverge with regard to immortality, but clearly, in The Antichrist, Fred N. doesn't dig the Christian version either:

"One should read Lucretius to comprehend what Epicurus fought: not paganism but "Christianity," by which I mean the corruption of souls by the concepts of guilt, punishment, and immortality. He fought the subterranean cults which were exactly like a latent form of Christianity: to deny immortality was then nothing less than a real salvation."

Final Thoughts: Professor George Carlin
"When I die I don't want to be buried, but I don't want to be cremated either. I want to be blown up. Put me on a pile of explosives and blow me up. Or throw my body from a helicopter. That would be fun. One stipulation: wherever I land, you have to leave me there. Even if it's the mayor's lawn. Just let me lie there. But keep the dogs away." - N&S:9


"If I had my choice of how to die I would like to be sitting on the crosstown bus and suddenly burst into flames." - N&S:10


"Isn't it time we stopped wasting valuable land on cemeteries? Talk about an idea whose time has passed: 'Let's put all the dead people in boxes and keep them in one part of town.' What kind of medieval bullshit is that? I say, plow these motherfuckers up and throw them away. Or melt them down. We need the phosphorus for farming. If we're going to recycle, let's get serious." - N&S:79

Five Brief Riffs on the Oddity of Time

Writing about time travel in a whimsical fashion yesterday, I found myself daydreaming about "time" today; some of it was not daydream-like, though. Rather: intrusive thoughts on the weirdness of being caught in a system of seeming cause-effect/one thing follows another and so we have "time." And how many of my favorite writers and thinkers have sought to escape from "time" or to brilliantly recontextualize it so that we may incorporate some newness into our cognitions about "time."

1.) "Time is money." We hear this far too often. In the extremely fascinating book Metaphors We Live By, from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, they note how there's a semantic unconsciousness in modern Western culture about the metaphorical aspect of "time" in our everyday lives. We all have goals, aspirations, desires. We also know there is some sort of upper limit that circumscribes when all that ends, presumably in death. Therefore, "time" is valuable in our culture. If time is money, then smaller chunks of time must come at some expense, and indeed, look at your phone bill. If time is money, then we can "save" time, and "spend" time. And indeed, we all say this stuff. But "time" does not = money. It's a metaphor! Its ubiquity in our everyday phrasing and thinking strongly suggests that time is a valuable commodity to us. The authors give many examples to ponder: "You're wasting my time." "This gadget will save you hours." "I've invested a lot of time in her." "Do you have much time left?" "You don't use your time profitably." "Thank you for your time."

One of my favorite poets, Ed Sanders, writes in his book 1968:
                                                  Why not waste time
                                                   for is not time itself
                                                  the biggest waster of them all?


2.) I love David Lynch's films. In one I've seen about nine times, Lost Highway, which Lynch co-wrote with the novelist Barry Gifford, there is a scene very early on in this (quite bizarre/surrealistic) film in which a husband and wife have called Los Angeles police detectives to their house to discuss eerie video recordings of themselves, in their own house, and they have no way to explain them, because they did not record themselves. Someone is leaving on their front steps an envelope with a videocassette of Fred and Renee on it. Could a burglar be doing it? Who knows? It's very disturbing stuff, it doesn't make much sense, and the cops ask the couple a series of questions, and this brief sequence always gets me:

Detective named Al, addressing his question to the wife, named Renee: Do you own a video camera?

Renee: No. Fred hates them.

[Both detectives look at Fred]

Fred: I...like to remember things my own way.

Al: What do you mean by that?

Fred: How I remember them. Not necessarily the way they happened.

Fred (played by Bill Pullman), seems almost apologetic in giving this admission. He's an avant-garde jazz saxophonist, so we know he's an artiste who's pretty out-there, but he also seems "normal" enough to us. And the first time I saw this film I noted this odd bit of dialogue, which suggests Lynch himself. And I am also that way, in many ways. I've given a transcription of the dialogue, because I once wrote it down on a note card. So I am not remembering those lines the way "I remembered them," but in our everyday lives, most of us operate by default in a way that has us remembering things in the way we need, or want, or are merely able to store them. But how many of us actively seek to remember things the way we remember them, and "not necessarily the way they happened"?

Furthermore, research shows that memories shift imperceptibly over time. Our memories are incredibly fallible! ("But your honor! I am an eyewitness!!! I saw it with my own two eyes!" Yea, yea, yea...) But few of us are aware of it. I think that consciously saying, "I want to remember it my own way," is both liberating and true to neurobiological "facts." It also acknowledges the difference between our memories and the way others might remember an event, and besides, it's sorta trippy.

I will only address my best understanding of the issue of Recovered Memory Therapy if anyone requests it. If you're interested, I consider Elizabeth Loftus the go-to gal here...

3.) In Mary Roach's hilarious study of sex, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, she notes studies that show the brain has an altered sense of "time" in the discrete state of orgasm. It's as if there is some "lost time." And I think all sorts of non-ordinary and ecstatic states invite warped senses of time, because we are usually in our ordinary time, embodied beings with all kinds of biological "clocks" that are unconscious but govern sleeping/waking, digestion, alertness, blood sugar levels that need to be attended to, etc. An unseasonable truth is that, let's face it: much of our waking lives is fairly robotic. The quest is to have less robotic time and more non-ordinary time.

So when we're doing something we enjoy for intrinsic reasons - gardening, knitting, playing a musical instrument, reading, riding a bicycle, listening to music, watching movies, etc:  time seems to "flow," and we lose "track" of time. When we're "in" (which suggests space) the new state we must re-orient ourselves. Orient means a certain direction, which also addresses time's other aspect of space.  (And space's other aspect is time, of course.) And this altered experience of "time" is almost always related to enjoyment. So: do as much of those things that allow you to "flow" and get outside your "normal" time!

                                                                Ezra Pound

4.) Ezra Pound would be one of those writers (among many) that I love who seem to see "time" as an obstacle, and sought to remake perception of time into something more suitable to a poetic vision both for himself and his readers. Pound scholar Peter Makin notes that Daniel Perelman's 1969 book Barb of Time has remained influential in "arguing that The Cantos set up a duality of mechanical time and of escape from that into a mystical timelessness." In Canto LXXIV:
                                               
                                           Time is not, Time is the evil, beloved


In Canto CXV, near the end of Pound's life, when he feels he has hurt everyone he loved with his stupid antisemitism:
             
                                          When one's friends hate each other
                                                    how can there be peace in the world?
                                           Their asperities diverted me in my green time.
                                           A blown husk that is finished
                                                       but the light sings eternal
                                            a pale flare over marshes
                                                            where the salt hay whispers to tide's change


                                            Time, space,
                                                    neither life nor death is the answer.


When the younger poet Donald Hall was hanging out with the 75 year old Pound, he told Hall, "All the time - I feel the hands of the clock - moving." And this was in a time of Pound's life when he rarely spoke...Pound's ideogrammic method is a way of retrieving things that are separate in ordinary, chronological time, and rearranging them so that they are brought together in the mind's sense of appropriate juxtapositions. I like this passage from Pound scholar Guy Davenport, on Pound's sense of time:

"To have closed the gap between mythology and botany is but one movement of the process; one way to read The Cantos is to go through noting the restorations of relationships now thought to be discrete - the ideogrammic method was invented for just this purpose. In Pound's spatial sense of time the past is here, now; its invisibility is our blindness, not its absence. The nineteenth century had put everything against the scale of time and discovered that all behavior within time's monolinear progress was evolutionary. The past was a graveyard, a museum. It was Pound's determination to obliterate such a configuration of time and history, to treat what had become a world of ghosts as a world eternally present."
-from The Geography of Imagination

5.) It is now thought by neurobiologists that the obvious warping of memory among smokers of the cannabis flowers is reflected in the endogenous cannabinoids we make in our own nervous systems. Marijuana only "works" because the THC and other psychoactive molecules in the plant mimic the structure of receptor sites and our body's own neurochemicals that we have evolved with over multitudes of millennia. And it's often thought that forgetting is a mental error, but it's a crucial biophysical action that must happen; we need to forget! We do not want to remember every little detail of every day. It would be too scattering! We need to be able to edit down the vast whirling mass of data our nervous systems encounter every single moment of waking life. Our intentionality must be given some space to work, it seems. And pot allows us to amplify the ordinary sensation, and with this non-ordinary state, our sense of time becomes altered. It's more complex than this, if we get to the neurochemistry of smoking pot and the phenomenology of being stoned, but because of pot's ability to mimic our natural chemicals that allow us to forget, it allows us to concentrate in a certain way on the ordinary so that it seems extraordinary. It's yet another way to get yourself "unstuck" in "time." (And if it "seems" extraordinary, we may as well say it "is" that way, for us, then, eh?)

Aye, even a glass of tap water tastes magnificent to me on pot. Music is even BETTER! And I love it just fine when I'm not stoned. Similar things could be said for sex, perception of paintings, having a conversation (which is filled with curlicues of meanderings and forgetting what your point was, but still: fun!), and for some, writing.

I have heard it said that stoned bloggers write posts that are too long, but I have no proof of this, do you?

Thanks for your "time."