Monsieur Flaubert Is Not a Writer

 

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

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

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

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

Continue reading at Metapsychosis:

https://www.metapsychosis.com/monsieur-flaubert-is-not-a-writer/

My first book of essays Masks of Origin is available through Untimely Books:

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Image: William Baziotes, Dwarf, 1947

The Long Curve of Descent

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

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

 Since that morning, I have explored a variety of methods to get from the place where my feet were planted to the larger space that surrounded me, which was not, of course, mine in any personal sense. The path has been a labyrinthine one. My raids on the inexpressible have imposed many contradictory demands. Scholarship and meditation have opened onto vision, onto a mode of knowledge as intimate as it is vast. An ocean, of a sort, boiled, and I could feel the enormous pressure on my skin. Convulsing on the current, I was thrown here and there. Over time, the heat of vision has given way to a much cooler sense of transparency. Now the years no longer turn in any one direction. Space, the magician, stops to show how the trick is done, as I reach for the child playing with clay on his back porch. But always, there are gaps, which demand that I let go of any sense of certainty, which also ask that the reader should play a more active role.

 Without gaps being left, my raids on the inexpressible would serve as no more than travelogues. My goal is to take the reader to a space that will pose a subtle challenge, a challenge that may, upon reflection, turn into a threat. The reader must then return to his own coast. He must do his best to convince himself that no shift in his perception has occurred.

 Continue reading at Scene4: International Magazine of Arts and Culture: https://www.scene4.com/0223/briangeorge0223.html

 Image: Salvador Dali, Splitting the Atom (Dematerialization Under the Nose of Nero), 1947

 My first book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books: https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Interview with Layman Pascal for his Integral Stage Author Series

 

My YouTube interview with Layman Pascal for his Integral Stage Author Series just went up. The podcast was prompted by the publication of Masks of Origin, my first book of essays, but the conversation ranges broadly over issues related to creative process, spiritual exploration, other-dimensional guidance, the relationship of speech to silence, and the paradoxical nature of time. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyWzWn_99aA

My recently published book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books: 

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

 

The Art of Deep-Sea Fishing

 

C.J. Moore wrote,

 It was as if the poem came to life, and it was now reading itself from the great poem of the cosmos. This was happening on so many levels that I was just a twig in a maelstrom. I danced with the experience, but it was like dancing with a shark. I would find myself sitting in the university library, with my eyes buried in corridors of Egyptian temples that wound their sentences through languages that have long since vanished in the sands of time, and I would suddenly wake up with a start and I would be reading Aurelia by Nerval, and I would see myself walking through the streets of Paris, following Nerval's footsteps. I was seeing the hallucinations he saw, seeing where he was going in dark rooms when the vision stood before his astonished gaze. Then I would suddenly wake hours later walking down the hill from the university, not knowing how I got there, and I would stop and feel the last light filtering through the trees and wonder “Who are you?”

 I responded: When I taught junior high art, I developed a strategy that I referred to as “creative disorientation.” Many students could not remember that, from the ages of three to seven, they were once in love with art, and most had come to believe they did not have any talent. ‘Show; don’t tell,” was the operative principle. It was not that I did not have any clear-cut goals in mind. A goal would be clear to me, but not to them, and, by a process of “reverse engineering,” I would lead students into an almost unbearable state of disorientation, which would swell into a kind of cognitive crisis. I was familiar with this mini-version of the abyss. I had stared into it. It had spoken back. While the experience of disorientation would be particular to each, I knew the general habits that were preventing these students from gaining access to their talents. Reactions would be supervised. Adjustments would be made. A nudge here. A show of support there. At some point, almost inevitably, a student’s cognitive crisis would flip over into a breakthrough, and it would open up a space in which real learning could occur.

 In situations such as the one that you describe, in which a hair’s breadth separates a breakthrough from a breakdown, I sometimes wonder if this is what is going on. With a goal that is clear to them, but not to us, perhaps our other-dimensional teachers have reverse engineered a confrontation with the abyss. To this end, no academic knowledge would be adequate, and no human teacher could see far enough ahead. Then too, such teachers know that ecstasy is our primal out-of-body state, and they do not lose any sleep if the student must be tortured. Some degree of disorientation is a small enough price to pay to learn to what extent our vision has been compromised. We tend to see what we expect to see. We fail to grasp the thread that would lead us through the labyrinth.

 It is tempting to theorize that other methods could have been used, that a different path would have led to the same end. Could our teachers not have given us a true and false questionnaire? “When I was a boy of fourteen,” Mark Twain writes, “my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” So too, it can be difficult for us to see that our teachers know much of anything, until, turning back, we note that the Earth has become a small speck in the distance, and we then exclaim, “Aha!”

 A straight line is not always the shortest distance between two points, and certainly not in the education of a poet. If we had learned more about French Symbolism and Surrealism in school, it would have made it much more difficult for us to discover these things for ourselves and would have removed much of the fun and mystery from the process. Lautreamont would have become an eccentric version of Longfellow. The quiz on Les Fleurs du Mal would have been as subversive as the one on Hiawatha. Revolutionary fervor would have been graded on a curve, and school policy would have demanded that each essay should be taken back whole from a dream. If, with a wink, a cuneiform chanteuse were to wave to us from a street corner—too hot, too avant-garde to be true!—school policy would encourage us to make love to her in class. Upon climax, she would turn back into clay. Verese’s Arcana would be the school’s atonal fight-song, and Picasso’s “I do not seek; I find” the motto.

 Hey, those ideas could work! A Man Ray photo could be used for the cover of the High Modernism textbook, perhaps the famous one of Meret Oppenheim standing nude in front of a printing press, smeared in ink, with one hand lifted in an ambiguous gesture against her forehead. Our project would of course be subject to approval by the Texas State Board of Education.

   Continue reading in Scene4: International Magazine of Arts and Culture:

https://www.scene4.com/archivesqv6/2021/aug-2021/0821/briangeorge0821.html

My recently published book of essays, Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence, is available through Untimely Books:

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Entering the Tunnel of Time in Cappadocia

 

Solon, you Hellenes are but children, and there is never an old man who is an Hellene…The human race is always increasing at times, and at other times diminishing in numbers. And whatever happened either in your country or in ours, or in any other region of which we are informed—if any action which is noble or great, or in any other way remarkable has taken place, all that has been written down of old, and is preserved in our temples; whereas you and other nations are just being provided with letters and the other things which States require; and then, at the usual period, the stream from heaven descends like a pestilence, and leaves only those of you who are destitute of letters and education; and thus you have to begin all over again as children, and know nothing of what happened in ancient times, either among us or among yourselves.—Egyptian priest to Solon, Plato, Timaeus

__

The year was 1973. I was 19. Most of my friends had left for college. After working all day in maintenance at the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, I was free to spend six hours in the stacks of the Clark University Library. Later, after pouring a large glass of milk, I would then often stay up until 2:00 AM or so, listening to the crickets, watching the ghosts of sunken empires throw shadows across my ceiling. I would fill notebook after notebook with just barely legible writing, trying to translate my intuitions into some sort of linear form. On the plus side, this way of life created a single-pointed monastic focus. On the down side, I feared for my sanity. Over the preceding three years, I had experienced some violent surges of energy and involuntary vision states, and there did not seem much to block my being swallowed by the depths. 

I had no idea to what extent I could trust my internal guidance. At certain moments, I would feel that I was being, almost physically, swept off by an ocean. I would then be overcome by two contradictory types of nostalgia: the first, for the solid earth of my childhood, and the second, for this ocean’s other shore. Growing wider by the day, a hole had opened in my solar plexus, through which currents would pour, taking billions of my atoms with them. There did not seem to be any top part to my head. There were days when I didn’t dare to look at the horizon. I feared that it would eat me. As a practical matter, this was trickier than it sounds.

I should probably have searched for a spiritual teacher. I had no interest in cults, though, and I tended to associate the one with the other. If I ever did manage to locate such a creature, would they see me as more than another ghost, and how would I manage to test them? There were other, more important, reasons that I didn’t bother to search. I wasn’t good at following orders. If I was newly aware of the limits of my knowledge, I was still self-protectively arrogant. I did not mind making mistakes, and I had a strong desire to begin from where I was.

The key issue, though, is that I already had a teacher, of a kind, although it would probably be more accurate to refer to this shadowy presence as a catalyst. In dreams and out of body experiences, he was less of a calming, parental figure than a threat, just as much of a trickster as a guide. In one dream, for example, I was nailed to a cross and left to hang for several hours. “See, that was not so bad,” he said. In another, I plummeted like a comet from the sky and hit the ground. Contrary to what some researchers claim, it is quite possible to feel pain in a dream. “Am I dead?” I asked this guide. “That is a matter of opinion,” he said.

Then, in 1973, at the age of 19, I had the first and longest of a series of dreams that would stealthily reshape my relationship to time, that would lead me to see our theories of history as absurd, defensive structures. In this “dream,” which lasted for five hours or six hours, off and on—I woke up for a few minutes every hour or so—my guide and I had rolled aside a large stone in what seemed to be the Cappadocia region of Turkey to then enter a winding tunnel. This tunnel led to what would be the uppermost of a long series of collapsing cultures.

We would wander, unseen by the local populations, through marketplaces and theaters and academies and governmental buildings and cult centers and sonically-attuned circles, observing with wide eyes, only to have to escape, at the last minute, when these strata were destroyed by meteors, floods, fires, earthquakes, and invading armies. A crack in a wall would open, or we would jump into a well, or a stairway would lead down. On certain strata, the chaos was there from the beginning, with the swirling of crowds, the storming of encampments, the burning of gardens, the random smashing of works of art, the extermination of tribes, the massing of unknown forces in the distance, and always, we would, at the last minute, just barely manage to escape, going down, then further down.

So, this dream, if you could call it that, planted the seed of my later orientation towards deep time. In 1995, when Klaus Schmidt began his excavation of Gobekli Tepe—a vast temple complex dating to at least 10,000 BC and then deliberately buried circa 8000 BC—I was not in the least surprised. That is, I was not surprised that the site was there. What was surprising was that it had taken so long for an archeologist to take an interest. As I found out later, the site had actually been discovered in 1963, by University of Chicago and University of Istanbul archeologists, and then promptly written off. Were those the tips of 14-20-foot Paleolithic t-stones? No, probably just some Medieval rubble. Why would anyone think otherwise?

Continue reading at Dark Mountain:

https://dark-mountain.net/entering-the-tunnel-of-time-in-cappadocia/

My book Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence is available through Untimely Books.

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/ 

Black Gold: Pluto's Helmet of Invisibility, Excerpt

Although I came of age physically during the later days of the counterculture, my first period of creative maturity—in the late 1970s—coincided with the death knell of the counterculture and the birth of punk. In Boston, the transition from one to the other was more natural than one might guess. A lot of countercultural energy had already turned dark by the beginning of the decade. We had stamped our collective foot against the shadow of the empire, and still that shadow grew. We could not stop Agent Orange from destroying 18,000 square miles of forest. We could not prevent dioxin from disfiguring the limbs of the not yet born. We could not stop napalm from burning at 2200 degrees, or Dow Chemical from making billions. For evil to triumph, it was only necessary for good men to believe in their own virtue, to assume that their good intentions were enough. Our chanting had purged only two percent of the demons from the ocean. The rest were perhaps annoyed.

 Cults had vacuumed up the survivors of entheogenic breakthroughs, the wide-eyed, the fearless, the utterly unprepared. Did the “shattering of the ego” always lead to greater peace of mind? Without an ego, it was difficult to tell. It had just come out that the FBI had sent agents to teach bomb-building skills to the Weathermen, or so the rumor went. Taste in music was no guarantee that a radical could be trusted. The most violent of subversives could be agent-provocateurs. The Lords of Deep Time had appointed Altamont to be the Mother of All Battles. She had, quite unexpectedly, announced the end of an era. She buzzed like angry wasps. Rolling thunder was her jewelry. She set the tone for the next decade, but she only hinted at the disillusionments to come. The Age of Aquarius had lasted for five years or so. Seeds planted on February 18th, 3102 B.C., were only just then coming to fruition. Having skipped a beat, the Kali Yuga had returned.

 There was, in fact, no shelter to be had. There was no deferment for the bourgeois psyche, no evolutionary saferoom at Big Sur. With breathtaking stealth, in a triumph of the behaviorist black arts, the Revolution had been corporatized. Many objects only looked like objects; they had morphed into commodities. The orgone would continue to darken until there was no way to distinguish a real vision from its logo. Mescaline was out; speed was in. It would soon be replaced by cocaine. Free love back-to-the-land communes had gone the way of Atlantis. The free love, in some approximate form, survived. By the mid-1970s, STDs had staged a full-frontal assault on the dream that sex led to liberation. AIDS—then working undercover in the Belgian Congo—would soon make its debut. Antibiotics would begin to lose their alchemical cure-all status. Already, having whet its teeth in the Golden Triangle, the CIA was testing its joint-venture model with South and Central American drug gangs. The scent of paranoia was as common as the scent of marijuana. A knock on the door meant that it was necessary to escape onto the roof.

 It was said at the time, “All politics is personal,” which led us to assume that each small act was being scrutinized. It was also true that global forces were in motion, and we would learn that our anxieties did not go deep enough. There was no way to put a face on the decentralized plutocracy. It was everywhere. It was nowhere. Hundreds of thousands of jobs per year were already being outsourced, and once middle-class workers were beginning to suspect that they had been repurposed as serfs. Factories had turned into bird houses. There were no trains in the freight yards. Many sensed that there was something wrong. What is was, who knew?

Continue reading at Dark Mountain:

https://dark-mountain.net/black-gold-plutos-helmet-of-invisibility/

My book Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence is available through Untimely Books.

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

 

 

A few weeks back, I thought I would glance at my blog. My book Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence had just come out, and I thought I might post a link if I could still gain access. Since I haven’t posted anything since 2017, I was quite surprised to find that the blog was still receiving 450-500 pageviews per month. For anyone who might be interested, this is just to let you know that will be posting some excerpts from the book, along with excerpts from and links to recent publications in online magazines and journals. (I guess I should probably also take a lot of the older material down, most of which has been either scrapped or revised a dozen times over.) Masks of Origin: Regression in the Service of Omnipotence is the first in a series of six books that Untimely Books is planning to publish, at a rate of probably one per year. Here is a link to the order page for the book.

https://untimelybooks.com/book/masks-of-origin/

Comments on Masks of Origin

Blending fantasy and history, fiction and myth, the essays of Brian George read like scripture from a lost civilization or the dream journal of a buried god. Intimate yet strangely universal, this is prose that touches on the very essence of poetry. It wipes away boundaries and liberates forces in the reader and in language itself. Masks of Origin is perhaps best described as a history of our collective soul, as seen through the prism of a singular mind. Surely, George is one of the rare living writers who truly deserve to be called visionary.

J.F. Martel, author of Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice: A Treatise, Critique, and Call to Action and co-host of the Weird Studies podcast

The demand for things to simply “be what they are”—no symbols, no masks, just fungible commodities that are forgotten almost as soon as they are consumed to make way for the next meal—seems to be a hallmark of this age. If that is so, some might consider this book a sort of anachronism. But it’s the opposite: a glimpse both of what has been forgotten, and is yet to be. It contains a world of puzzles and ciphers laid out upon the meandering labyrinth path of life. It won’t get you rich, or laid, or cure your bunions. But for those who are still seeking the ineffable, (likely because they have no other choice), it is a pitcher of cool water in the desert, so that you might continue the journey, wherever it leads.

James Curcio, author of Narrative Machines: Modern Myth, Revolution, & Propaganda and Tales From When I Had A Face

In Masks of Origin, Brian George will blow your mind and make you see everything—time, space, life, death—in radically new ways. This is a delightful combination of memoir and philosophical journey. The ideas are complex, but the language is easy to follow, creating an experience that is both profound and accessible. The book is filled with personal stories that touch universal truths. I love hearing about mystical experiences and have heard many amazing stories, but Brian’s stand out for their vividness, depth, and engaging, lucid description. If you’re in the mood for a fun and mind-expanding ride, read this book!

Stephanie Wellen Levine, author of Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey among Hasidic Girls; Columnist at Hevria and The Wisdom Daily

George’s work is precisely its own thing: an archaic genre the western world has long forgotten it possessed, a genre I suspect was already defunct to the Western imagination even at the time of Homer. George is a phenomenal pagan, thrown forwards or backwards in time to this era. I will hesitate to call his work poetry, not that it does not more than serve the function of poetry, but his method is one that predates the definitions we have given poetry in modern literary theory. It is primal incantation, a spell, dreaming as vital action. In Yorubaland, the part of Nigeria where I grew up, one of the praise epithets of Aziza (a supernatural being who travels in a tornado) is, ‘He is the one for whom thought and action are one and the same.’

I read recently that in Holland they have perfected a method that enables their asphalt roads to automatically discover their potholes and repair themselves. I believe the incantation genre, as explored by George in Masks of Origin, is a technology that assists the earth in her attempts to heal herself, after centuries of our having feasted recklessly on her flesh. George’s work harks back to a moment in time or dreamtime memory in which to speak is to act, powerfully, with cosmic stealth, and at times with purgative violence. Its aim is less to inform—though it informs aplenty—than to widen the reader’s gaze in a fundamental way, almost akin to giving the reader the gift of a new tongue.

Olujide Adebayo-Begun, author of The Book of Supreme Happiness

The universe had no beginning. Reality always existed. The earliest tradition of poetry, carried from Sun to Sun, is carried by Brian George.

Don Burgy, artist, writer, teacher

Brian George steps over voids with legs that are rainbows, which snap like bands back into his body, catapulting him into the abyss. He free-falls, unwinding from the eye of Providence and plummeting down the spine of Babel.   Leaving more than just a smoking crater, he penetrates to the earth’s molten core, absorbing the shock of earthquakes and storing the energy in his bones, tracing what lay scattered, no matter how disparate and disjointed, back to primal source. He plunges all back in the fire and melts it down to extract what will endure.

Cooling after his incredible creative and alchemical process of solitary determination, Brian George emerges on the other side of earth with an ice-cap on his head, with new tools crafted, new weapons forged, and a new voice and new language even, both intimate and epic, manifold and polyphonic, in his Masks of Origin.

John Dockus, artist

 Steeped in myth while staying grounded in day-to-day reality, George ushers forth a contemplative surreality. His writing takes you on a journey through a labyrinth, revealing cryptic truths and exposing the long and treacherous shadow of history. Round and round the labyrinth you go, George’s words leading you like Theseus in search of the Minotaur. And when you have reached the center of the labyrinth, you find God as a detonating atomic bomb—truth as monstrosity, a darkness that illuminates.

Brandan Styles, artist and weirdo spirit

The writing of Brian George is built upon personal experience, which he translates into a universal algorithm. Each verse reads as geometrical sequence, keys that unlock pieces of consciousness. This is where poetry becomes music. The poet lives in the center of the vortex, memories flooding his vision, being assigned symbols in the matrix. Brian weaves his way through a hall of mirrors, travelling to emptiness, where the faceted diamond of knowledge is forged and brought to the surface in his writing. His words are clues; one’s understanding shifts and expands the more one reads. There are lingering questions, and passages that come into clarity over time. This only serves to enhance for the reader the incredible fortune of not-knowing, and thus, discovery.

Marjorie Kaye, artist and art reviewer

 Over a dozen or so years of experiencing George’s writing, I have developed my perception and understanding of it. The cosmology George paints is vast, complete with montages of events and characters. The painting emerges from direct yet oddly juxtaposed language. I savor each sentence until its imagery alights within my mind and then progresses to the next, flowing across dimensions of space and spans of time. The overall effect is of an open field of consciousness. And though the ideas and events may, at times, seem alien on the surface, the writing evokes an evanescent sense of recognition. Somehow, I participated. How do I return? George’s writing creates a bridge into that liminal space.

Jason Strobus White, Shamanic Practitioner and Technologist

 

The Black Arts of the Elite

 

Brian George

In the forum for my essay "The Snare of Distance and the Sunglasses of the Seer," Jasun Horsley wrote, “I'd like to address the idea of the stupidity of the 1% also. I think it may be true of 99% of the 1% but not of the 1% of the 1%; not at all. These do not appear to be driven by a goal of wealth or worldly power but something deeper & darker.” I responded: The whole of the economic, political, media, and corporate landscape does strike me as an exercise in black magic, a part of which is instinctive and a part of which is quite conscious. This exercise may be sophisticated in its means, but it is also, I believe, still fairly basic in its ends, to the extent that anything is. Even wealth and power can be seen as ritual acquisitions; how much of either can anyone really use? Just beyond this, as you say, there may be a space where something more opaque and perhaps more pointlessly malevolent is going on. If I were going to look for examples of opaque malevolence, though, I don’t know that I have to peek behind any curtains. There seem to be more than enough immediate examples of it to go around! And if I were going to piece together some sort of super-intelligent dark globalist cabal, I would probably select a different cast of characters, one that did not include Margaret Mead and Arthur C Clarke and Aldous Huxley. But I think your point is that they are dangerous exactly because they widely admired and appear to be so innocuous. Richard Dawkins, on the other hand, I would be happy to put on any sort of a hit list.

Exceptions aside, I think that I get what you are saying. We are far more at risk from those who have somehow managed to successfully appropriate and rearrange the almost invisible substructures of our minds than we are from any external form of coercion. This has probably been true from the time of the first empires and bureaucracies. I think that it is the rule rather than the exception that the most successful form of colonization is internal. Get people to enthusiastically embrace the forces that oppress them, and there is only a minimal need to resort to force. The brilliance of this method can be everywhere seen in the sad spectacle or US politics. The threat of career death or prison or physical violence is, of course, always there, just out of sight, in the background. I still don’t think that any of this necessarily demands any depth of intelligence or breath of ritual power on the part of the colonizers. To some extent, the process would seem to be an almost automatic one; wealth generates wealth and power tends to accumulate in smaller and smaller circles. Those with power want to hold on to it and those without it want to be a part of something larger than themselves. These are natural enough instincts, which are just as naturally perverted. Whatever the opaque malevolence that we might attribute to some person or group, my attitude and strategy remain the same. As the Roman playwright Terrence said, “Nothing human is alien to me.”

Contrary to what John Lamb Lash and some other contemporary theorists assert, when the Gnostics spoke of the hypnotic power of the Archons, I do not believe that they were referring to the actions of gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli or of blood drinking interdimensional reptilians or whatever; rather, they were pointing to the all too familiar political, economic, artistic, religious, and occult powers that have somehow managed to monopolize the foreground of our attention, who have caused us to believe that we are smaller than we are. (There is a good smallness, of course, of the sort that allows us to slip though the eye of a needle, as well as a bad smallness, which causes us to kiss the boots of those who do not have our best interests at heart.) In The Snare of Distance, I have tried to point to the space that exists between and beneath and within and around things.

All that we see will pass. The familiar will again become strange, and will then cease to exist altogether. The current global empire—which is perhaps maintained by a web of conjurations—will inevitably fall, as has every previous one. “But ours is so much bigger!” some might argue. Unfortunately for the current empire and its henchmen and apologists and true devotees, great size is no protection, as has been proven by the Mastodon and the Tyrannosaurus Rex. The common adage “Time heals all wounds” is, of course, not especially reassuring, and, viewed from one angle, even silly. This is sort of like saying to a person suffering from an agonizing attack of appendicitis, “Don’t worry, you will soon be dead.” Viewed from a different angle, such a statement may indeed point to a meeting place in which all of our current problems will be redefined. It all depends, I guess, on what we think death is, and on how we imagine the space that will open up beyond it.

Continue reading at Metapsychosis:

https://www.infiniteconversations.com/t/the-snare-of-distance-and-the-sunglasses-of-the-seer-part-one-by-brian-george/668/32

Illustration: Ernst Fuchs

The Gods that Descend from the Black Sun Must Be Fed

 

By Brian George

I wrote this piece on sociopathy in high places about five years back. It seemed appropriate to repost it on this national day of mourning.

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Jonathan Zap, in his essay “”Foxes and Reptiles; Psychopathy and the Financial Meltdown,” wrote, “Many have commented that the SEC tends to employ those trained in finance but who are not as clever, ruthless or determined as those they are trying to monitor. I would suggest that they be open to hiring psychopaths with MBAs and offer them multi-million dollar bonuses and recognition, celebrity recognition if possible, for catching high level scams. Since psychopaths are a force of nature we are unlikely to eliminate, we should instead harness their unique talents to serve the socially useful purpose of catching other psychopaths. Who could possibly be better qualified, better able to pierce strategies of deception, than other highly motivated psychopaths? To use Wall Street metaphorically, we need a highly motivated team of clever reptiles and foxes to catch other reptiles and foxes.”

A key principle in medicine is that few things are toxic in and of themselves, or rather, that the amount of the toxin is what determines its effect: a large amount might result in death, but the right amount might heal us of a dangerous disease. The way that the toxin is introduced would play a role. “First, do no harm,” wrote Hippocrates. If only things were so simple! For “what harms can heal.” In their different ways, Allopathy and Homeopathy make use of this principle, which perhaps can be more generally applied. The current global laissez-faire economy is like a body without an immune system.

Death is imminent; doing nothing is not safe. No laws protect us, and a vast shadow eats the animatronic organs of Democracy, which should leave, in the near future, just a shell. It has been 66 years since happy US soldiers jitterbugged with nurses in the street, or grabbed random strangers to kiss. We had beaten the Axis powers. The Free World loved us. We were a beacon to the dispossessed. Now Corporate Fascism rules. Lawyers are the new Luftwaffe. Judges are the SS. Hedge funds are the new Reich Bureau of Occult Affairs. MSNBC, FOX, and CNN compete for the mantle of Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. They report all the news that’s fit to be projected, that is to say: Before its Time, and provide us with all viewpoints from A to B.

In love, from childhood, with the American Dream, we are hesitant to acknowledge that the year is not 1948. A few dollars are left; they will be sent to an off-shore bank in the Caiman Islands. We are not what we were, but at least let it be said that we have kept up our appearances. No one knows when the Barbarians walked casually in through the gates. Now, they are more inside than we are. They are closer to the Mad Fetus in the control room than we ever were, except, perhaps, at ceremonies for dead heroes in their transfer tubes. At such ceremonies, the presence of the Mad Fetus hovers over us. The dead are a priceless resource. Our grief is a kind of food, which he consumes.

There are rings inside of rings, with fail-safe mechanisms at key bioenergetic points. The gods that descend from the Black Sun must be fed. Select Stockholm Syndrome victims may be called upon to remove the remnants of the burnt offering from the table, at which point the law specifies that it be ritually re-sanitized. The Barbarians wasted no time in dismantling the gates, in order to put up their own gates, which keep us from getting out. The life of the Republic is hanging by a thread. The Supreme Court will soon meet to decide a case about scissors. Perfectly dressed, a force that is not quite human has been scheduled to attack. There are those who say that our response is several decades behind the curve.

And so, to develop our analogy: If we think in terms of “the sociopath-as-toxin,” then we had best be prepared for each possible side-effect in advance, and, in each test case, pay close attention to determine just what it is that we see. We could also compare the two systems in terms of “the sociopath-as-virus.” In Allopathic medicine, whose key principle is supposedly that “opposites treat opposites,” it is—oddly enough—accepted that a neutralized form of a disease might also serve to catalyze the cure. Homeopathic theory is supposed to be the opposite, 180 degrees off, on the other side of the circle, but the key principle is “let like be cured by like.” This is not that different in the abstract from mainstream immunology.

What does this tell us? Perhaps it tells us that opposites interact in ways that we don’t expect. Perhaps it tells us to put aside pet theories in order to focus on whatever works. An almost occult correspondence exists between the toxin and the symptom, such that a small amount of something can help to protect us against a larger and more threatening quantity of the same. A virus attacks, and, once our system has gained access to its encrypted DNA, we are able to manufacture the corresponding antigen. Unseen to the world, a transfer of life-altering data has occurred, which brings the earlier right/ left opposition to a halt, as it redefines the nature of the contest. In Chapter eight of the “Tao Te Ching” we read, “The supreme goodness is like water…It gathers in unpopular places. Thus it is like the Tao.”

The best defense is to co-opt one’s enemy, and to get him to do exactly what one wants. In a similar fashion, Jonathan Zap has suggested that we could use a sociopath with an MBA to root out other sociopaths on Wall Street. If bureaucrats are impotent, and less sharp than those they monitor, then sociopaths may be the necessary agents—whether calibrated toxins or pre-processed viruses—to prompt healing in the Body Politic.

Brian P. Akers, one of the participants in the Reality Sandwich forum for this essay, was somewhat horrified by the suggestion. He wrote, “Any notion that evil or manipulative psycho-malignancy can be hitched up to our wagons plays right into its hands. Evil loves such good but misguided ideas…To afford it an opening, of any least kind, is only to woo, court and flirt with disaster…Psychopathy rests on inherently violent interests or abusive purposes. Period…(We must) recognize that stuff for exactly what it is, and deal with it accordingly…Otherwise, we become its host or prey, no ifs ands or buts." I would categorize this as the classic “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists” approach. Well, that isn’t always foolproof, as we have seen. Evil does exist, but it can be a mistake to attribute to it vast mythological powers. Much evil is, indeed, banal, and only appears strong because of our ignorance and the mystique that we lend to it.

As a society, we make a great many “bargains with the Devil,” and, whether rightly or wrongly, we believe that our very survival depends upon some use of “controlled lethality.” On Wall Street, for example, we trust sociopathic hustlers to make vast amounts of money for themselves, in the hope that some portion of the wealth will “trickle down.” And it’s not as if we are unaware of what Wall Street firms are capable of; financial speculation and corruption have fueled countless boom and bust cycles, which have caused incomparably more suffering than all the serial killers who ever lived. Why is it such a problem to employ a sociopath to attempt to take back a little of what another sociopath stole?

The military is another illustration of a bargain with the Devil. In the current climate, Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib are not aberrations, and then there are all of the dead Iraqi civilians that nobody seems to notice or to talk about. 120,000 is one official estimate—but who knows? It is so unimportant that we have not really bothered to count. We could no doubt do things in far better ways. My point is that, in practice, most societies do tend to do exactly what Jonathan Zap suggests—to strategically make use of the particular talents of the sociopath, or, at a minimum, to activate and harness their members’ sociopathic shadows. Sometimes this works. At other times, such as now, it tends to blow up in our faces.

In spite of wholesale surveillance programs, such as the NSA’s NIMD—or “Novel Intelligence from Massive Data”—and the FBI’s now (supposedly) defunct “Carnivore”(!), there can be no prophylaxis against Evil. But we can ask questions that might help to keep us conscious, such as: "Have we incorporated the enemy on purpose or by accident?" The key thing is perhaps transparency. It would probably be best, too, to remove the fox from his role as supervisor of the chicken coop. Somehow “regulation” has become a dirty word.

As Baudilaire said in "The Generous Gambler," “The lovliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist.” In the same way, sociopaths in high places have convinced us that “markets are self-regulating,” that the jet-setting heirs to family fortunes are heroic Ayn Randian “job creators”—veritable Atlases!—and that the best thing that the victim of the Stockholm Syndrome can do is to kiss the hand of his/ her captor. So too: that the 3497 of our 9/11 dead must be avenged by the murder of 120,000—and still climbing—innocent civilians in Iraq, that US citizens can be arrested and detained for a lifetime without being charged, and that midnight military tribunals are a substitute for Justice. A bit of intelligent oversight might be nice.

In the end: Sociopathic evil, as sly and charismatic as it is, is generally not quite as strong as goodness that is active—as opposed to merely polite—and that does not allow itself to be treated like a mark.


(Illustration:  Victor Brauner) )

A Note on "Autumnal Fallout," a childhood memory of the Cuban Missile Crisis

 

 

Brian George

My memory of childhood events is generally hit or miss, and I am always curious to discover why certain events are so much more vivid than others. Why can I return to some as though they were still happening while others are now totally obscure?

I was just looking at the dates for the Cuban Missile Crisis, which began on October 14th and ended on October 28th of 1962. (Others date it from the 15th or 16th to the 27th.) What I had not really thought about before was the length of the crisis, which was roughly two weeks, in relation to my somewhat peculiar psychology as an eight-year-old. Like many kids with the beginnings of an artistic orientation, I was what you would describe as “over-imaginative,” although I don’t know that this really describes my degree of suggestibility and my sense that physical reality was not a closed system.

For example, that same year, I had an odd experience with my friend Francis S. (Francis was three years older than I was, and he would later go on to become a career criminal.) One day, at around 3:00 PM, Francis and I were climbing a long cement stairway with several landings that wound up a hillside behind a neighbor’s house. Halfway up, Francis grabbed my arm, stared into my eyes, and announced that I would never be allowed to leave the landing where we stood. “If you ever take even one step off this landing,” he said, “you will be immediately cut to pieces by ghosts.” I have no idea why I would have believed him, but I stayed on the landing for about two and one half hours. Hunger finally got the better of me, and I summoned up the courage to head home for supper.

Given my sometimes dangerous naiveté, I can only imagine the effect that the threat of imminent planetary destruction might have had on me. Even at the beginning of the crisis, my experience of this threat was visceral, and my sense of its full reality then had two weeks to sink in. I suspect, as I say at the beginning of the piece, that this experience changed my whole way of looking at the world. The two-week time period also gave me an adequate chance to visualize and process the possibility of my own death. The peaceful fall of the autumn leaves at the end of piece, which signals a kind of bittersweet embrace of the possibility of my own and the planet’s annihilation, now strikes me as even more of a literal memory than I had thought.

Read "Autumnal Fallout" at

https://www.infiniteconversations.com/t/autumnal-fallout-by-brian-george/773

Illustration: Brian George, Autumnal Leaf-Head, 2004