This excellent biography by John Szwed, published in 2023, documents the life of one of the XXth Century's most interesting, intelligent and unique eccentrics. Harry Smith (1923 - 1991) defies easy description. He's been called a polymath for his expert comprehension, experimentation and innovation into a plethora of both arcane and popular arts and sciences. The book's byline reads: "The Filmmaker, Folklorist and Mystic who transformed American Art." From the dust jacket description:
"He was an anthropologist, a filmmaker, a painter, a folkorist, a mystic, and a walking encyclopedia. He taught Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe about the occult, swapped drugs with Timothy Leary, had a front row seat to a young Thelonius Monk, lived with (and tortured) Allen Ginsberg, was admired by Susan Sontag, and was one of the first artists funded by the Guggenheim Foundation."
My interest in him, in part, stems from the fact that he was an early recording engineer who kept it up, on and off, for his whole life. Smith grew up in the Pacific Northwest and developed a strong interest in Native American culture early on. At age 15 after discovering the writings of Franz Boas (1858 - 1942), the German-American pioneer of American anthropology, Smith began treks up and down the coast with portable recording equipment documenting indigenous tribal rituals through audio recordings, photography, water-color paintings, drawings and attempts to craft his own system of dance notation.
Szwed writes that Smith pursued this activity for 8 years. "Harry's seriousness, persistence and, humility gained him the respect of tribal leaders, who allowed him to use technology they might otherwise have had good reason to fear to document their songs, narratives, customs, language and games." He brought a disc-cutting machine to capture higher quality audio than the wire recorders which at that time comprised the standard. This fascinating period of Smith's life and career gets covered brilliantly in the book with much background and and intellectual context.
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"I'm glad to say that my dreams came true. I saw America changed through music."
– Harry Smith
Throughout his life Smith collected a wide variety of cultural artifacts including Seminole textiles, paper airplanes, Russian Easter Eggs, string figures like the Cat's Cradle, pop-up books, Tarot cards, etc., etc. some of these finding their way into museums like the Smithsonian. Szwed recounts how he got into string figures after reading a book by Kathleen Haddon, String Games for Beginners that demonstrated how to form a loop of string into various geometric shapes. He found out that these figures could be found everywhere on the planet and it became a lifelong area of research beginning with the Native American peoples he visited. He was interested in patterns that travelled across cultural boundaries. I suspect the influence of Franz Boas's aim to find out what it meant to be human.
Smith's collection of rare 78 recordings, beginning around 1940, eventually turned into the Anthology of American Folk Music. This had a profound influence on a wide range of musical artists including: Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Pete Seeger, Led Zeppelin, Springsteen, Sonic Youth, Elvis Costello, Beck, Wilco, Joan Baez, Taj Mahal, The Byrds, Canned Heat, Gordon Lightfoot, Harry Nilsson, Kris Kristofferson, Gillian Welch, Nick Cave, and Tom Waits to name a few. These recordings span from 1927 - 1932. Acquiring them became much more earnest in the early 1940's when the US government began melting them down to recycle their materials for the war effort.
In an essay by Luis Kemnitzer included in the Anthology's 1997 reissue he writes:
"In 1946 when I was shipping out of Seattle, Harry Smith was a legend among record collectors and jazz and country music enthusiasts that I met. People had been introduced to Lummi Midwinter Dances, which they called Spirit Dances, by Harry Smith. He had introduced blues record collectors to Jimmie Rodgers."
Moses Asche of Folkways Recordings commissioned Smith to assemble his favorite songs into a set that became the Anthology which included Harry's extensive anthropological descriptions and annotations. It was initially released in 1952, but took some years to catch on.
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Harry Smith first met the influential counter-cultural poet Ed Sanders in 1962 at a bar on Avenue A and 12th Street. Szwed writes: "He (Smith) was clutching a first edition of Aleister Crowley's Book of Lies and was declaring it a work of genius." A year or so later Sanders formed the Fugs with Tuli Kupferberg because they thought they could come up with better lyrics than the early Beatles songs which were becoming popular in underground (and not so underground) circles. Harry convinced Moe Asch to finance their first record and served as the Producer for it. Harry also came up with their name, the Fugs.
One of my favorite stories in the book concerns the attempt, lead by the Yippies, to exorcise or levitate the Pentagon in 1967. I had always considered this pure absurdist humor, but we find out that Ed Sanders, given the task of organizing it, relied on Harry to structure the ritual. He served as their magickal consultant providing them with some basic principles to go by. I would have loved to hear more about Smith's Thelemic connections. He was friends with Bill Breeze, the current Outer Head of the O.T.O. and James Wasserman who worked as Weiser and later became well known for his book designs of Thelemic related titles among other things. Harry illustrated the paperback edition of The Holy Books of Thelema. Breeze made him a Bishop in the Ecclesia Gnostic Catholica, the religious branch of the O.T.O.
Illustration by Harry Smith
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I feel akindred spirit with Harry Smith through his interest in recording natural environmental sounds. The first time I did so happened at age 20 in the top floor of a hotel in Banff, Albertawhen touring with a bar band called Relay. My friend, the lighting director Bob Gregory, had a reel to reel tape recorder. For a couple of days early in the morning I placed a pair of microphones outside the window of the penthouse suite where the band stayed and recorded the Dawn unfolding over Banff Avenue for about an hour each time. About 11 years later E. J. Gold made a comment to me that Bardo spaces could be navigated by sound. That set me on a path of recording ambient sounds in a variety of locations: sacred spaces, streets, museums, etc. I used a D.A.T. recorder and a Sony stereo condenser microphone to capture the sounds. Traveling and working throughout the planet with Bill Laswell in the late 80s and 1990s provided a wide variety of interesting locations. My first ambient recording of this nature occurred at the Basilica du Sacre Couer in Paris. Other recordings came from street sounds and temples in India (I recorded an elephant along with their sacred cows for the classical Indian violinist El Shankar), West Africa, the Australian Outback, Cairo and the King's Chamber in the Great Pyramid, the temple wall in Jerusalem, Rio de Janerio, Morocco, China, Mongolia, Tashkent, Samarkand, New York and Paris subways among others. I've also recorded interesting sounds found in my own backyard in Northern California. Les Claypool incorporated some of these on the Primus album Antipop. Tom Waits spoke highly of a sample reel of these recordings I made for him when auditioning for the job of his recording and mix engineer. In 2004, with Bill Laswell's help, I released a compilation of these called All Around the World on the Belgian label, Sub Rosa.
Cosmic Scholar recalls one phase of Smith's ambient recordings after moving to Boulder, Colorado in 1988 to stay and lecture at Naropa University, the school Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa founded over a decade earlier. Allen Ginsberg had arranged Harry's residence there.
"Within a few weeks of his arrival, he had recorded hundreds of hours of ambient sounds, 'pointing to the correlation between auto horns and birdcalls, and the intercommunication between machines and the animate world.' he could record the sounds of Boulder with a mic out the window, including crickets, cicadas, and squirrels at different times of the day. He told Beth Borrus, his assistant for his summer lectures, that he was looking for patterns: 'It was a long time before I realized that the squirrels were carrying on intelligent communication between each other, which reached a peak in the day when they were able to stop the birds from singing when the sun came up, which is why I was recording the thing anyhow. They evidently had some prior agreement, the Dawn Chorale.'" - Cosmic Scholar, p. 333.
A few years ago I was working in Portland at Flora Recording a studio owned and operated by the prolific Producer and Engineer Tucker Martine. Tucker and I have some tangential history together: I had worked alongside his brother Layng at Laswell's studio in Brooklyn and we both had received some form of mentorship from genius Engineer Jason Corsaro. Tucker told me a story that while taking a musique concrete course at Naropa he worked at a coffee place in Boulder, a spot Harry Smith frequented. His boss advised him to strike up a conversation with Smith. He took the advice and had several conversations with Harry. I feel something subtle and intangible may have been passed on to Tucker with those interactions. He also got into making ambient field recordings and has released a couple of albums one of being Broken Hearted Dragonflies (Insect Electronica from Southeast Asia).
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Szwed also documents the crazy, chaotic, contradictory, indigent side of Smith's life. He has several anecdotes and stories along those lines. Smith never met a drug he didn't like and had a long and extensive history of alcohol abuse. He never had anything resembling a conventional means of income mostly living off of the sometimes strained generosity of others. When he sometimes received large or moderate sums of money to finance the art projects, he would often spend it recklessly. Paying his hotel bills or rent was never a priority. Somehow he always found money to constantly acquire books and drugs.
John Szwed questions his ability to write a good biography on such an elusive subject as Harry. He more than rises to the occasion with this definitive work. It's a fascinating read. I've left out whole areas of Smith's activities, most notably his filmmaking projects. It's a book that inspires creativity through Harry Smith's example. I give it 5 stars and highly recommend it.
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne appears an example of enlightened writing. Its vivid descriptions, powerful observations and attention to detail come from an illumined consciousness. It's been said that turned on mystics have a kind of beatific vision as if an interior light brightens everything they see. This describes the sense I get from much of Hawthorne's writing in this novel, even the darker, more tragic scenes. I get a similar sense reading Marcel Proust, William Blake or Arthur Rimbaud. This illumination seems transmittable to some degree. When I read writing of this quality, Tolkien is another example, it changes how I see the world. It wakes me up a little bit to the beauty all around. I contend that reading thought provoking enlightened literature is a path to higher consciousness, as valid and potentially effective as any other.
The Scarlet Letter and the scarlet letter – the book itself and the subject of the book have multiple levels with multiple meanings. On its surface, the novel appears a puritanical, Christian morality tale. The protagonist, Hester Prynne, has committed adultery and must pay the penalty of wearing a scarlet letter A on her chest for the rest of her life. Hawthorne writes like a trickster playing with the reader's perceptions, imagination and assumptions. Most people assume the A stands for adultery, but that's never explicitly stated in the book. This "A" comes to signify much, much more. It reverses itself as a symbol of punishment by transforming into an initiating symbol of strength and true will for Hester.
Hawthorne writes like an Adept with the first mention of the scarlet letter. The storyhas a long prelude called "The Custom-House" formulated as a memoir of when Hawthorne temporarily abandoned writing to make money and support his family as a customs inspector, something he did for 3 years. Like a true maker of illusions, he inserts the scarlet letter into what otherwise seems a truthful account making it appear that the subsequent story exists as genuine historical lore. He's also upfront and clear about its Hermetic nature and mystical depth. Upon first encountering the dusty letter A in the Custom-House some 200 years after the events told occurred, he calls the historical circumstances around it to be a riddle with little hope of solving. Then he writes:
"My eyes fastened themselves upon the old scarlet letter, and would not be turned aside. Certainly, there was some deep meaning in it, most worthy of interpretation, and which, as it were, streamed forth from the mystic symbol, subtly communicating itself to my sensibilities, but evading the analysis of my mind."
Again, this statement refers to the book as a whole and to the specific artifact that is the subject of the tale. He's speaking of art of psychometry – the psychic reading of impressions from artifacts – why I called him an Adept. Psychometry is allegedly how Gurdjieff received his ancient knowledge: traveling around Central Asia, North Africa and the Middle East reading artifacts. These artifacts included ancient dances. Hawthorne also hints at the method of how he obtained this psychic reception: focused and fixated attention on the letter – his eyes "would not be turned aside."
We see more Hermetic references and coding in The Scarlet Letter. The formidable antagonist, Roger Chillingworth, Hester Prynne's much older husband, was a scholar in Europe who became a doctor; he has his own devious agenda. He's described as an alchemist for the way he concocts his herbal healing potions and at one point is compared to Paracelsus.
Cabala is introduced when Hester has an occasion to visit the Governor's mansion. The interior "had indeed a very cheery aspect; the walls being overspread with a kind of stucco, in which fragments of broken glass were plentifully intermixed; so that when the sunshine fell aslant-wise over the front of the edifice, it glittered and sparkled as if diamonds had been flung against it by the double handful. The brilliancy might have befitted Aladdin's palace, rather than the mansion of a grave old Puritan ruler. It was further decorated with strange and seemingly cabalistic figures and diagrams, suitable to the quaint taste of the age ..."
Hawthorne employs the technique of presenting an image ripe for cabalistic interpretation – sunshine on broken glass sparkling like diamonds – then explicitly refers to Cabala as if providing a hint for how one can look at the prior image.
The comparison between the pagan Aladdin's palace and the Puritan mansion I find interesting. Setting his story in mid 17th Century Puritan Boston, Hawthorne frequently appears critical of dogmatic Puritan values and their lifestyle though not entirely of the Christian milieu. Many commentators connect Hester with the story of Esther, the Persian Queen in the Old Testament who courageously saved the Jews in her country. If you google, "What does the story of Esther teach us," the AI buddy will provide a number of answers that easily apply to The Scarlet Letter.
The book ends with the line engraved upon the one tombstone that serves for the graves of both Hester and her one time lover, Arthur Dimmesdale: "ON A FIELD, SABLE, THE LETTER A, GULES."This looks coded, but once again Hawthorne provides the key that it uses heraldic nomenclature. Heraldry is a system of communicating symbols, signs and colors to provide identification usually as a familial Coat of Arms. Field indicates the background; sable means black; gules means red. On a black background the scarlet letter A.
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And now a word from our sponsor, Earth Coincidence Control Office.
After writing the above paragraph I took a break. Looking at You Tube, I saw Lon Milo Duquette's daily video in my recommended list. Today's offering, just posted, covered the subject "Aleister Crowley and Baseball." It starts with Lon holding up an old California Angels baseball cap with a large scarlet letter A close to the camera so that it fills the frame.
The scarlet letter representing an Angel does find a parallel in the novel with Hester's young daughter Pearl. Describing the way Hester dressed her in a crimson velvet tunic "embroidered with fantasies and flourishes of gold thread" for the visit to the cabalistic governor's mansion. "So much strength of coloring ... was admirably adapted to Pearl's beauty, and made her the very brightest little jet of flame that ever danced upon the earth." ... "It was the scarlet letter in another form, the scarlet letter endowed with life!"
Nathaniel Hawthorne was profoundly influenced by the late 16th Century epic poem The Fairie Queen by Edmund Spenser, a recognized classic of Hermetic literature. So much so, that he named his daughter Una after one of the main characters. A primary aim of modern Hermeticism is the valorization and promotion of Female Intelligence. This appears evident in contemporary writers of the esoteric persuasion such as James Joyce, Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Thomas Pynchon and Gilles Deleuze to name a few. It began as far back as the 15th Century with Francois Rabelais' classic Gargantua and Pantagruel.
In The Fairie Queene Una plays the love interest and guide to the Redcrosse Knight on his journey. Her story becomes an apt allegory of female wisdom and higher intelligence. She compares favorably with Babalon in the Thelemic cosmology. Spenser's poem has several strong female characters, notably different from the literature of that era, maybe from much literature of any era. The Scarlet Letter's strongest and most intelligent characters are two woman, Hester and her daughter Pearl. Pearl's name also has Biblical allusions referring to the pearl of great price (Matthew 13:45-46). Hawthorne calls her an "elf-child" though says the Puritans think she might be a "demon offspring." She ends up becoming "the richest heiress of her day, in the New World." She was a new born baby at the beginning of the book reaching the age of 7 when the tale ends. The final chapter writes of what happened to her afterwards. In real life, Una Hawthorne was 6 at the time it was written thus likely providing an inspiration and model for Pearl.
Another mask or guise of the scarlet letter is being a Bardo Guide, a guide in and around death. Hester took on the task of visiting and providing human contact with sick people in times of pestilence. "There glimmered the embroidered letter, with comfort in its unearthly ray. Elsewhere the token of sin, it was the taper of the sick-chamber. It had even thrown its gleam, in the sufferer's hard extremity, across the verge of time. It had shown him where to set his foot, while the light of earth was fast becoming dim, and ere the light of futurity could reach him" (emphasis added).
There are more scenes touching upon death and describing a liminal, bardo-like space. Significantly, Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter in a 6 month burst of inspiration following the death of his mother. Thus, he was most probably in an altered state of mind some, if not all, the time he wrote the book. I infer this based on my own experience of feeling like I was on a mild psychedelic for about 3 months following the death of my father.
Synchronicity strikes again. Within two minutes of writing the last sentence I received an email from a woman who knew my mother well and had just discovered the Memorial I wrote for her in 2020 following her passing.
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The Scarlet Letter tells a tragic love story, but there appear instances where it sublimates into divine love, what the ancient Greeks called Agape. This describes the love or vitality that lights up and provides vivifying life force to Creation. May the force be with you. In this, and in other ways, it aligns with the doctrine of Thelema which advocates a philosophy of love: "Love is the law, love under will." Thelema also advises being true to your genuine nature – as opposed to what societal and other conventions tell us how to be – with the injunction: "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law." We find this great lesson expressed in the "Conclusion" chapter: "Among many morals which press upon us from the poor minister's miserable experience, we put only this into a sentence: – Be true! Be true! Be true! Show freely to the world, if not your worst, yet some trait whereby the worst may be inferred." The minister's experience felt constantly miserable precisely because he lived a lie to himself and to the world. He had a habit of putting his hand over his heart as if in pain.
An example of Agape, providing life force to creation, gets suggested in the memoir prelude, "The Custom-House" where Hawthorne discusses the nature of romance writing. It begins in a bardo state (bardo = the realm of the in-between): "Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrighting us.
. . . The somewhat dim coal-fire has an essential influence in producing the effect which I would describe. It throws its unobtrusive tinge throughout the room, with a faint ruddiness upon the walls and ceiling, and a reflected gleam from the polish of the furniture. This warmer light mingles itself with the cold spirituality of the moonbeams, and communicates, as it were, a heart and sensibilities of human tenderness to the forms which fancy summons up."
Aleister Crowley believed Rabelais forecast the new Aeon when writing of the Abbey of Thélème in Gargantua and Pantagruel. I consider The Scarlet Letter another precursor to the new Aeon envisioned by Crowley. We find a literal prophecy in its penultimate page:
"She assured them too of her firm belief, that, at some brighter period, when the world should have grown ripe for it, in Heaven's own time, a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish a surer ground of mutual happiness." Hester thought she might be this prophetess, but decided that wasn't possible due to her circumstances. "The angel and apostle of the coming revelation must be a woman, indeed, but lofty, pure, and beautiful; and wise, moreover, not through dusky grief, but through the ethereal medium of joy: and showing how sacred love should make us happy, by the truest test of a life successful to such and end!"
This "ethereal medium of joy" finds multiple expressions in The Book of the Law, the received text that inaugurated the new Aeon according to Crowley. The ninth verse of the second chapter easily applies to the life Hester Prynne:
"9. Remember all ye that existence is pure joy; that all the sorrows are but as shadows; they pass & are done; but there is that which remains."
There seems ample room for extensive Qabalistic interpretation in The Scarlet Letter, but I'll spare the reader my full exegesis except to drop a few crumbs pointing to further research. The scarlet letter A connects, of course, with Aleph and all its correspondences – The Fool in the Tarot. Aleph (ALP) appears a prominent recurring image in Finnegans Wake as Anna Livia Plurabelle, another resonance with female Intelligence.
A also corresponds with an upright pentagram, a five pointed star because of its shape. We find something very close to this kind of scarlet letter in the Book of the LawI:60:
"My number is 11, as all their numbers who are of us. The Five Pointed Star, with a Circle in the Middle, & the Circle is Red."
Crowley's comment on this verse: "The Circle in the Pentagram? See Liber NV."
Liber NV is numbered 11. It begins:
"000 This is the Book of the Cult of the Infinite Without
00 The aspirant is Hadit. Nuit is the infinite expansion of the Rose; (remember this rose). Hadit the infinite contraction of the Rood.
1. Worship, i.e identify thyself with the Khabs, the secret Light within the Heart.
11 is the number of Magick or energy tending to change. The Scarlet Letter proceeds through a process of transformation. The first chapter, "The Prison-Door" begins with a sad, very strong male image in front of a prison door. The novel ends with a woman apostle and angel in the ethereal medium of joy saying how sacred love should make us happy. Very basically, the book starts sad and ends happy. Here's the first sentence:
"A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with woman, some wearing hoods, and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes."
Yet even in this harsh locale magical aid is offered in the form of a wild rose-bush at the threshold of the prison door "covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he went forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him."
Rose, June, beauty and deep heart of Nature all correspond with Tiphareth, the central sphere on the Tree of Life that also corresponds with the heart chakra. Hawthorne breaks the fourth wall at the end of this short chapter by plucking one of the rose-bush's flowers and offering it to the reader. "It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow." After giving a rose to the reader, he blatantly tells us it's a symbol. In the United States, and many other parts of the world, it sure feels like we're living in the "darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow." Hawthorne gives us a huge clue on how to relieve and get through it.
Much could be made of both Hester Prynne and Pearl's initials connecting with the Hebrew letter Peh, a correspondence with The Tower in the Tarot aka The House of God. Also, the scarlet letter A seen as a pentagram and worn on the chest gives an obvious image of the instruction to protect the heart.
Two classics of literature separated in time by nearly 90 years. Very different in their style of writing, yet similar in size, and in the full on aim of attempting to consider everything imaginable in life and in death. Both works come chock full of philosophy, metaphysics, alchemy, magic, and bardo information but differ drastically in presentation. The narrative seems clear and evident in Moby Dick, we always know where we are in the story. It's just the opposite, extremely opaque, in Finnegans Wake. The new reader often has no idea what's going on in terms of any storyline and is advised to consult a reader's guide such as the excellent one by Tindall or Campbell & Robinson's Skeleton Key. The surface plot of Finnegans Wake seems either inconsequential or non existent. It all takes place over one night with the protagonists asleep until the end. Moby Dick's plot is more substantial, but you could probably cut out two thirds of it or more and not affect the basic elements of the story.
These two magnum opuses offer masterpieces of metaphor over multiple levels of sense. W.H. Auden called Moby Dick an 'elaborate synecdoche' in which whale fishing becomes an image of all our lives, teeming with parable and multiple symbolic correspondences. The same description could easily apply to Finnegans Wake sans the whale fishing. A snapshot of the microcosm - the local environment, representing the macrocosm – all and everything, seems the ultimate synecdoche. One example of this in Finnegans Wake: the initials HCE, that of the main protagonist Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, also stand for "Here Comes Everybody."
Melville writes of uniting the microcosm with the macrocosm at the end of chapter 70, "The Sphynx:"
"O Nature and O soul of man! how far beyond all utterance are your linked analogies! not the smallest atom stirs or lives in matter, but has its cunning duplicate in mind." In this chapter, they behead a Sperm Whale and "in the midst of so intense a calm, it seemed the Sphynx's in the desert." Captain Ahab proceeds to address the dismembered head as if its spirit lived on and could communicate what it has seen in its travels. This seems on par with a magician grilling a non-human entity that's been invoked:
"speak, mighty head, and tell us the secret thing that is in there. Of all divers, thou has dived the deepest. That head upon which the upper sun now gleams, has moved among this world's foundations. Where unrecorded names and navies rust, and untold hopes and anchors rot, where in her murderous hold, this frigate earth is ballasted with bones of millions of the drowned; there, in that awful water-land, there was thy most familiar home."
This quote alludes to the land of the dead at the end; that subject is another point in common between MD and FW as we shall see. Death runs throughout Moby Dick. The first words in the book come from a person who is dead. Chapter 49, "The Hyena," laughs at death. The cycle of death and rebirth/renewal appears throughout Finnegans Wake. Obviously, the title itself immediately suggests Finnegan's death. The reader confronts death on the front cover.
The use of Cabala provides another commonality between Joyce and Melville. Cabala appears evident in the above quote. The Hebrew letter Resh means "head" and corresponds with The Sun in the Tarot. Melville demonstrates this correspondence with the phrase: "That head upon which the upper sun now gleams."
No direct evidence exists that Joyce read Moby Dick except, possibly, for the apparent appearance of it in the Wake. The occurs in FW page 13 in the penultimate paragraph. Before we examine that, let's look at what immediate precedes the great white whale's entrance. Top of page 13:
"So. This Is Dyoublong?
Hush! Caution! Echoland!"
Dyoublong alludes both to Dublin and to the phrase "do you belong?"
The second line suggests the Bardo of HCE, with the suggestion reinforced in the subsequent paragraph which has multiple references to death. For instance:
"gravemure" = grave + mure (wall). This gets reinforced a couple sentences later with: "Hear? By the mausolum wall." Then: "With a grand funferall" (funeral, combined with the suggestion of laughing at death). In this paragraph we find multiple references to music and listening or hearing, and a couple to magic. The Tibetan Book of the Dead, aka the Bardo Thodol, translates as the power of liberation by sound. At the end of the paragraph for example: "They will be tuggling foriver. They will be lichening for allof. They will be pretumbling forover. The harpsdischord shall be theirs for ollaves."
"They" and "theirs" in the last four sentences could easily refer to disembodied souls traveling in the land of the dead; "foriver" alludes to both "forever" and "for river." The river, in Finnegans Wake represents the flowing of LIFE. Next sentence: "lichening" = listening; "for allof" – all of time or all of life? Then "pretumbling forover" seems a unique way to represent the Bardo, the territory a soul enters after life ("forover") and before rebirth ("pretumbling"). The last sentence: "harpsdischord" – many events feel discordant in the Bardo, but some things feel harmonious like a harpsichord might sound; "ollaves" reflects "allof" again, but also suggests "all loves" (all our dearly departed) by switching the "o" with the "a"; "ollaves" also reminds me of those small balls of fruit that go in martinis though I honestly don't know what that has to do with anything.
The paragraph just examined also contains another reference to Dublin, "Dbln." Dublin plays prominently into the Bardo or subconscious mind of both HCE and Joyce. Believe it or not, all this appears relevant to Moby Dick.
In the essay "Moby Dick's Hyphen" by David Collard, which appears in his book, Multiple Joyce, he writes that what Melville does for whales and the whaling industry, i.e. going into it at considerable length and detail, Joyce does for Dublin in Ulysses. If you're thinking of picking up a copy of Multiple Joyce to read how Moby Dick may have influenced him, don't. I just communicated everything he has to say on the subject. It's not a bad essay on Moby Dick, yet with little connection to Joyce. If you, like me, wondered why the original title of Moby-Dick has a hyphen in it that never appears in the text, there's nothing mysterious about it. According to Collard, a typesetter inadvertently put a hyphen in the title and it stayed, basically a typo. The rest of Multiple Joyce looks good, but I haven't read enough to recommend it.
Skipping the next paragraph in FW p. 13 after the one just analyzed brings us closer to our whale friend:
"So, how idlers' wind turning pages on pages, as innocens with anaclete play popeye antipop, the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds, annals of themselves timing the cycles of events grand and national, bring fassilwise to pass how."
The first phrase: how idlers' wind turning pages on pages could suggest reading a book. I know Joyce scholars give a different interpretation of "idlers'" so this may seem purely coincidental, but in Moby Dick chapter 102, "A Bower in the Ardacides" Melville calls the skeleton of a dead Sperm Whale washed up on the beach "a gigantic idler!" The next sentence has: "the mighty idler seemed the cunning weaver." Weaver is used metaphorically – when you read the whole passage it appears akin to the Sufi metaphor of weaving together the fabric of existence.
"the leaves of the living in the boke of the deeds" = the leaves of the living in the book of the dead. Joyce uses "leaves" multiple times in FW as a pun for leaving the body – told to me by Robert Anton Wilson in his Tales of the Tribe class.
In the same chapter, slightly before Melville calls the whale skeleton a gigantic idler, he writes: "Through the lacings of the leaves, the great sun seemed a flying shuttle weaving the unwearied verdure." The weaving metaphor plays throughout this section. "Leaves", as a metaphor for the soul leaving the body, right beside "the great sun" recalls the Egyptian Book of the Dead where the primary goal of the soul is to unite with Osiris after bodily death. Osiris qabalistically corresponds with the sun.
In his mid 19th Century ornate language Melville sums up this section with: "Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories."
Books of the dead deliver instructions and navigational tips for passing through the Bardo hopefully liberating the soul or programming a favorable rebirth (curly-headed glories). This information appears practically useful whether going through a physical, biological death or a psychological one with a temporary death of the ego. Both Finnegans Wake and Moby Dick qualify as books of the dead.
"bring fassilwise to pass how." I don't have a good read on this line and would only be speculating. In an earlier missive on FW, I postulated that the question "how?" appears central to the opus.
At last we get to our whale:
1132 A.D. Men like to ants or emmets wondern upon a groot hwide Whallfisk which lay in a Runnel. Blubby wares upat Ublanium.
1132 A.D. looks like a date, but seems more cabalistic, to me.
11 = magic, or energy tending to change; 11 also = a circularity of form or motion. Joyce had a strong interest in cycles of time. Finnegans Wake has a circular form.
32 = the ten Sephiroth (spheres) on the Tree of Life + the twenty-two paths that run between them. The Tree of Life provides the form for the filing cabinet of correspondences. Qabala can be considered one kind of coding or mapping of consciousness. It also maps the Bardo. These particular correspondences appeared in Sepher Sephiroth first published in 1909 by Aleister Crowley and derived from the work of MacGregor Mathers and Allan Bennett of the Golden Dawn. Joyce knew people from those circles such as William Butler Yeats and others. It seems probable those correspondences were known to him.
A.D. = after death therefore indicating the Bardo.
"groot hwide Whallfisk" sounds like great white whale-fish. "groot" = Danish and Dutch for "big;" "hwide" = Danish for "white;" "Whalfisch" = German for whale; "fisk" = Danish for fish. Melville mostly (incorrectly) considers whales to be fish in Moby Dick. The exception being when he considers how they have to breath air in chapter 85, "The Fountain."
Joyce's word for whale, "Whallfisk" contains both "all" and "whall" (sounds like "wall") – connecting with the multiple mentions of "wall" and "all" earlier on this page. Two earlier instances of "wall" occur beside images of death – by the grave and by the mausoleum. The Hebrew letter "nun" translates as "fish" in English and corresponds with the Tarot card Death. Whallfisk shows another wall beside death with the fish correspondence. Could this wall indicate the separation or boundary between life and death?
Men would look like ants when doing their business with a great white whale; "emmets" appears an archaic British word for ants. Extensive whale hunting would seem archaic even in Joyce's time; "wondern" sounds like wandering, but also "wonder" = a cabalistic pun for "all" when considering the mystical tautology, "all is one," (found at the very end of Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven, and elsewhere); "wondern" = wonder + n; nun = n = Death; ergo wondern cabalistically puts "all" besides "death." When you die, either biologically or egotistically, mystics say you have an opportunity to connect with "all."
"Blubby wares" = the oil obtained from whale blubber used as fuel in lamps at one time.
"upat" = "up at," but also translates as "four" in the Cebuano language, a language spoken in the Phillipines near where a lot of the action in Moby Dick takes place. Of course, for Joyce and his unbridled use of homonyms, four = for. Joyce uses the word "for" multiple times on this page (see above). Joyce starts the paragraph on p. 13 that I didn't examine: "Four things therefore..." as kind of a humorous pun on "four" with "therefore."
"Ublanium" appears close to an archaic name for Dublin (Eblana) and also sounds like Dublin.
Blubby wares upat Ublanium translates as"Whale oil for Dublin." Perhaps Joyce alludes to the archaic name for Dublin because of the archaic nature of this illumination. Whale oil stopped being used to light up lamps somewhere around 1860.
"Blubby wares" could easily indicate a shorthand term for Moby Dick (full original title Moby-Dick or, The Whale) as Melville provides encyclopedic information (wares) on just about every aspect of whales one can think of. Since Joyce identifies so strongly with Dublin, could blubby wares for Dublin, or blubby wares up at Dublin be a sly acknowledgement by Joyce of the influence of Moby Dick?
It's true that these passages analyzed don't provide an explicit connection to Melville or Moby Dick, but it comes pretty close with "great white whale," Moby Dick indisputably being the most famous one in literature. Let's call this circumstantial evidence.
More circumstantial evidence: Moby Dick begins by looking at the etymology of "whale." The first quote comes from Richard Hakluyt (Melville incorrectly spells it Hackluyt) and refers to a "whale-fish," very close to Joyce's "Whallfisk." Hakluyt goes on to stress the importance of "the letter H, "which almost alone maketh up the signification of the word..." Joyce's word for white, "hwide" begins with h.
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This seems the extent of Moby Dick appearing in Finnegans Wake if indeed it does at all. There are a couple of other parallels, but they don't seem convincing to me as anything more than coincidence. The closest comes on FW page 210 with: ". . . a reiz every morning for Standfast Dick" followed a couple of lines later by"two appletweed stools for Eva Mobbely." Someone else might have more luck connecting this, or anything else in this section to Moby Dick, I don't buy it, or maybe I don't see it. FW p. 492 has the name, Afamado Hairductor Achmed Borumborad whose initials make AHAB, and does show Arabic overtones, but the rest of the section appears to connect with One Thousand and One Nights more commonly known as Arabian Nights. It seems to have nothing to do with Captain Ahab.
Some general parallels between the two novels:
both appear very influenced by The Bible and by the works of Shakespeare.
the writing in both novels sounds musical, at times; moreso with Joyce. Both books incorporate songs; I only recall one in Moby Dick in chapter 9, "The Sermon," but the "Extracts" section at the beginning quotes from songs.
Joyce got known for putting lists and catalogs in. Melville has a little of that as does Rabelais who influenced them both. Melville quotes Rabelais in the opening section and directly mentions him later in the text.
Moby Dick originally was published in England as The Whale before assuming its final title, Moby-Dick or, The Whale. Wake and Whale sound alike and rhyme at the beginning. In the latter, taking out the "h" and replacing "l" with "k" turns Whale into Wake. The word Joyce uses for whale, "Whallfisk" removes the "h" in fish and replaces it with a "k." Would Joyce make such a subtle nod to Melville, by switching two letters? In my opinion, absolutely yes.
Water runs in the background (often the foreground), throughout both novels. Finnegans Wake famously starts with riverrun, sometimes called the "river of life." Most of the action in Moby Dick occurs in the ocean. It starts in the rain with Ishmael deciding to go to sea. The second paragraph begins a lyrical ode to water continuing for a few pages before landing on the same metaphor Joyce uses: "But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all." Joyce ends FW with "The keys to. Given!" before returning to the river that started it all.
This is the best video I've seen in a long time. The trippy visuals guarantee that you can watch it multiple times and see something new and different each time. The music presents a deep dive into the symbiotic relationship, the connections and reconnections through the blood that flows between mother and child beginning in the the womb. A spiritual voyage of discovery through a dreamscape bardo sequence leading to a return to the source.
David Pellicciaro landed the vision, wrote and arranged the music and performed it with a little help from his friends: Dale Fanning - drums, Wally Ingram - percussion, Scott Padden - bass, Scott Law - guitars, Beverly Modell - backing vocals, David Pellicciaro – piano, keys, sound design, vocal. Recorded by Dave at Lucky Devil Sound and by Danielle Goldsmith at Tiny Telephone, both in Oakland. Mixed and mastered by Yours Truly at High Velocity, Nevada City, CA. The video was directed and edited by Dylan Cortez-Modell based on Dave's concept.
William Blake would have enjoyed seeing his influence here. Timothy Leary may have reckoned it as a total immersion into the genetic code, a tour through the futique circuits of DNA. Enjoy!
This is the third article in a series on contemporary and ancient Books of the Dead. The first piece is here and the second one is there.
spiriti questi? personae?
tangibility by no means atasal
but the crystal can be weighed in the hand
formal and passing within the sphere: Thetis,
Maya, Ἀφροδίτη,
- Ezra Pound, Canto LXXVI
Note: "atasal" = union with God; from Avicenna.
Thetis = mother of Achilles who made him immortal, except for his heel, by dipping him in the River Styx, the river that runs through the Underworld.
Maya, also spelled Maia = the daughter of Atlas and mother of Hermes via a liaison with Zeus. The Greek word = Aphrodite, the goddess of love
The 23 Enigma – encountering a network of synchronicities and coincidences related to the number 23 – seems quite familiar to many readers of Robert Anton Wilson. He laid out his experience with this phenomenon in Cosmic Trigger – the Final Secret of the Illuminati. Multiple listings to Twenty-three appear in the Index beginning with William Burroughs telling him about it and recurring frequently until nearly the end of the book. The importance of this engima to Wilson's Hermetic development cannot be overstated. He compared it to the flash of insight Dr. James Watson received walking down a spiral staircase leading him to consider DNA as spiral-shaped, an intuitive hunch that led to cracking the DNA code. This opened up the world of Science and applied Technology to all kinds of new beneficial healing advances for humanity. "23 was my spiral staircase, my intuitive signal." ( CT I p. 46, Hilaritas). The 23 Enigma served as an entry point for Wilson to crack, actually more like construct, the code of numerology and correspondence found in the science of Cabala. I contend that this also brought beneficial healing advances for some parts of humanity through his writing and teaching.
Wilson presented the 23 Enigma so well that it entered the underground cultural lexicon. Some examples of this off the top of my head include an excellent, but short-lived (1987-1988) science fiction TV show called Max Headroom. The main character works as an investigative reporter for Network 23. Around the same time, a great film packed with esoteric information, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, came out. It opens with a Warner Bros. style cartoon, Somethin's Cookin'. In it, Roger gets tasked with babysitting Baby Herman after Mother says she's off to the beauty parlor. The baby innocently gets into all kinds of dangerous situations that Roger frantically tries to protect him from resulting in various daredevil slapstick antics. A refrigerator falls on Roger's head at the end of it, but he blows his part by seeing tweety birds instead of stars and gets fired. He pleads with the director, "please drop the refrigerator on my head again," the director replies, "we've dropped the refrigerator on your head 23 times already!" When you see this, especially after viewing it more than once and knowing the context of the rest of the film, it feels more like a deliberate inclusion rather than a random coincidence
In 2007 this enigma entered the mainstream with the film The Number 23 starring Jim Carrey – I have not seen this. The description of it says the protagonist finds an obscure book about 23 that leads to a descent into darkness. As recently as a few weeks ago on the TV show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Oliver played a clip of a jury foreperson reading the guilty verdict on 34 charges brought against a political candidate. To great comedic effect, Oliver showed each charge of guilty being read one by one in sequence only stopping at the 23rd.
According to Wilson odd coincidences and synchronicities tend to multiply as one gets more involved with the occult. I can verify this through my experience and would add that not only do synchronicities increase upon the spiritual path they can also help to guide. I've heard reports from several people that coincidences involving 23 become spookily more frequent after reading Wilson on the enigma. Part of the reason may certainly be attributed to selective attention. We see more 23s because we're looking for them or we gain increased maze brightness to that number simply from having read about the enigma; they jump out to us because we've tuned in to the phenomena. Anyone working along the lines of Scientific Illuminism is encouraged to be skeptical of assigning significance whenever seeing a 23. Yet, there seem occurrences of 23 (or any number important to us) not so easily explained.
Anyone who has come across and assimilated some kind of self-observation practice, whether from the disciplines of Buddhism, Yoga, Gurdjieffian 4th Way practices or something else can gradually become cognizant of the source of their attention. Meaning that a process of discernment can get applied to numerological encounters – did I make it up or is there some sort of occult communication going on? Perhaps a communication from one of the higher brain circuits? For the most part, these higher circuits seem occult (hidden) to our ordinary awareness. Can the more unknown parts of our DNA and nervous system arrange for synchronicities to communicate to our consciousness via unknown forces and interactions that can be modeled in quantum physics? What is the difference or relationship between a turned on C6 (using Leary's model) and the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel (using the Thelemic model)? As RAW said, and I concur, 23 can act as an intuitive signal. A signal for an educational process that starts to alchemically construct and turn on C6 – it seems never ending, yet always growing in beauty like a well tended garden full of joy to produce, and in a vegetable garden if I may extend the metaphor, tasty and joyful to eat the produce.
The discernment process reflexively exercises Intuition. Numerological consideration can be a workout for Intuition. Intuition does get stronger when exercised. Numerology can also be complete self-delusion without a healthy sense of skepticism. Intuition enters the picture when attempting to discern whether you're deluding yourself or if something real is going on.
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PROOF OF CONCEPT (maybe)
Regarding encountering synchronicities in this line of work, the day after I wrote the last few paragraphs a post came up in my Facebook feed from Dan Clore asking about: Musicians of interest to sombunall RAW fans?" I opened up the comments and one of the first ones I saw from Robert Rabinowitz included a quote from Cosmic Trigger about the 23 Enigma. The quote includes Wilson saying: "This, of course, illustrates Jano Watts' concept "The Net" – the lines of coincidence-synchronicity that connect everything-with everything. It is also an analogy with what phsyicists call QUIP – the Quantum Inseparability Principle" Rabinowitz goes on to write that he composed a classical sounding piece of music called QuIP. He plays the flute,with Jai Jeffryes on piano. You can hear the live performance of it here. Right below was a comment from Jessebob Baughman who gave a shout out to this blog and to my discography that I greatly appreciated.
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One of my favorite anecdotes concerns someone who posted a skeptical diatribe on Twitter about the 23 Enigma then went out to eat and was directed to table 23. It both blew and changed his mind. I've often been asked, what does it mean to encounter weird 23 synchronicities? So I've developed a take on it: 23 signals you're in the Bardo now. Let's look at how I got there:
By Gematria 23 = Parted, removed, separated. This easily suggests death - physically when parted, removed and separated from the body, and psychologically when parted, removed and separated from ego and personality.
23 = Joy
23 = A thread. Maintain the thread of consciousness while traversing the labyrinth of the Bardo appears a prime instruction in Tibetan Buddhism.
23 = Life
23 corresponds with death, the Bardo and Life and, for added measure, Joy. It recalls the line: "This is the creation of the world, that the pain of division is as nothing and the joy of dissolution all." (Liber Legis I:30)
In the "List of Primes" from 777, Aleister Crowley's Qabalistic dictionary,
23 = The glyph of life – nascent life
This nascent life could easily symbolize newborn life in the higher domains of consciousness.
Key 23 in 777's "Table of Correspondences" represents the Hebrew letter Mem, the element Water, and The Hanged Man in the Tarot. In The Game of Life, Leary connects Mem and The Hanged Man (and thus 23) with Caste 13, the first stage of what he calls "Post-Terrestrial Evolution" which include Circuits 5 - 8 in his model.
This Tarot card is an unmistakeable, dramatic signal from DNA that your nervous system contains post-terrestrial circuits which free the body from the gravitational and terrestrial limits of the womb planet. The Birth of the Self. The Self! The Self! - Leary, The Game of Life.
Hexagram 23 in the I Ching = Po/Splitting Apart. This splitting apart can suggest entering the Bardo when the spirit leaves the body or entering a psychological Bardo, even a Chapel Perilous when the higher, post-terrestrial consciousness breaks free from identification with terrestrial consciousness. Sufis call that "waking up."
The six lines of an I Ching hexagram carry a meaning when the line indicates that it changes. The first four changing lines in Hexagram 23 sound rather dire and appear to refer to complete identification with Circuits 1 - 4, what Sufis call "sleep." The fifth changing line could refer to the post-terrestrial side:
A shoal of fishes
Favor comes through the court ladies
Everything acts to further
A "shoal of fishes" could serve as a metaphor for the alignment of our wishes, aims and desires to formulate a Will to wake up. In Thelema, Nuit and Babalon are two of the court ladies. In the opening quote, Ezra Pound utilizes Greek mythology to present the court ladies Thetis, Maya and Aphrodite.
The top changing line in Hexagram 23 means:
There is a large fruit still uneaten.
The superior man receives a carriage.
The house of the inferior man is split apart.
A carriage = a vehicle which could be a kind of "body" for navigating the territory of the post-terrestrial circuits. "Man", of course, represents the ancient generic term Leary rebranded as "WoMan."
And finally . . . in Crowley 101, the online course Robert Anton Wilson gave under the auspices of The Maybe Logic Academy in 2005, we studied Chapter 23 from The Book of Lies. In that chapter, Crowley takes off on the then contemporary expression, "23 Skidoo" which means "get out!" He proceeds to express the word OUT as a Magick formula with sophisticated Qabalah, but more simply I think he also literally means "Get out" judging from the repetition of it five times. Get out of your comfort zone, get out (at least temporarily) of your habitual belief systems, the ordinary way of seeing things. Get out of your sleep. Get out of your enlightenment. It reminds me of entering the Bardo because whatever you get out of seems like a small death. It also recalls the Burroughs/ Gysin formula, "Here to Go" and Crowley's fifth power of the Sphinx, "to go."
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A large number, but not all of 23 synchronicities appear connected to either death or birth. In Cosmic Trigger, Wilson tells the story of William Burroughs introducing him to the 23 Enigma. According to Burroughs, it first came to his attention when an acquaintance by the name of Captain Clark mentioned that he'd been operating a ferry from Tangier, Morocco to Spain for 23 years without an accident. Later that very same day the ferry sunk killing everyone on board including Clark. Burroughs apparently turned on the radio that night and heard of an Eastern Airlines, Flight 23 plane crash also piloted by a Captain Clark. The flight was going from New York to Miami. It doesn't say if anyone died so I searched online for a record of it and couldn't find anything that matched those details. There was a mysterious plane crash of a United Airlines flight 23 in 1933 near Chicago killing everyone onboard that was later suspected to have been caused by a bomb and thus the first instance of terrorism of that kind. Although it was flight 23, it was not Eastern Airlines, wasn't going to Miami and the pilot wasn't Captain Clark. There was a crash near San Francisco in 1964 of a plane flown by a Captain Clark that killed 44 people. Clark had been shot by another passenger. Right time and the same Capitain's name, but it was Pacific Air Lines flight 773 – nothing to do with 23 or Eastern Airlines. Who knows what Burroughs heard on the radio that night, if he misheard it or if the newscaster supplied misinformation. Whatever happened, it caused Burroughs, and later Wilson to begin notating odd occurrences of 23. It's interesting to me that garbled communication brought recognition to the 23 Enigma. What agency was at work to bring this about? It's almost as bizarre, though not as far-reaching, as Albert Hoffman "accidentally" discovering the consciousness altering properties of LSD, another well-known, albeit much stronger Bardo enabler.
Wilson writes of taking a skeptical friend to see the film Charly about a mentally challenged character transformed into a genius by neuro-surgery in Operating Room 23 – a dramatic metaphorical death and rebirth. He lists a number of gangster deaths connected with 23. For instance, "Mad Dog" Coll shot on 23rd street at age 23. There's the story of Laura Huxley attempting to communicate with her husband Aldous after his death. A psychic told her Aldous wanted to communicate "classic evidence of survival" after death. The disembodied Aldous allegedly directed her to read line 23 on a particular page in a particular book on modern writers. The line praised Aldous Huxley "in this admirable communication." What strikes me as odd is how anyone living, even Aldous Huxley before he passed, would know exactly where the book was (fifth book on a certain self'), exactly which page and which line to read. Then, of course, we have the famous incident on July 23rd, 1973 when RAW received his first communication on the importance of Sirius following a prolonged excursion into the Bardo the night before courtesy of Crowley's Holy Guardian Angel ritual, John Lilly's Beliefs Unlimited and sex Magick.
In Cosmic Trigger RAW considers that the 23s might result from selective perception yet identifies this selective perception as the metaprogrammer, one of the higher neurological circuits. In other words, my words, the metaprogrammer selects perceptions to guide the mundane awareness to the expanded awareness of the post-terrestrial territory. Working with Aleister Crowley's terminology, as RAW did at the time, one could say the Holy Guardian Angel selects perceptions for the Initiate to enable its Knowledge and Conversation to function as a Guide. He writes that most of his communication from the HGA came from synchronicities.
Related to selective perception, RAW incorporates 23s into the Discordian Law of Fives "which holds that all incidents and events are directly connected to the number five, or to some multiple of five, or to some number related to five in one way or another, given enough ingenuity on the part of the interpreter" (CT I p. 57). His reasoning holds that 23 can break down as 2 + 3 = 5 so whenever you see a 5 or a multiple of 5 you're also implicitly getting a 23. Of course, by the same logic, 5s and their multiples also implicitly contain the numbers 14, 32, and 41. Ingenuity seems the key word for interpreting the Law of Fives. It means "the ability to solve difficult problems in original, clever and inventive ways." It also seems related to "genius" and, for me, connects with a work by Plutarch, De genio Socratis. It refers to the daimon of Socrates, which, according to Plutarch, means that Socrates has a guardian spirit who leads him in the best way. This also perfectly describes the Guide aspect of the Holy Guardian Angel. Paradoxically, the Law of Fives can come across as a rationalization for making shit up to see whatever it is you want to see, or conversely, intuitively connect with the HGA to receive guidance. Crowley connects 5 with The Hierophant from the Tarot, the one who communicates the secrets of the temple. Incidentally, RAW writes that he put all the research and data he found concerning 23s in Illuminatus!
As I see it, strange sightings of 23s can serve as a reminder of being in the Bardo, the space of in betweenness, in between waking sleep and enlightened awareness. Coincidences can serve as a reminder to make the attempt to wake up. Waking up can seem as simple as being fully present in the moment, disengaged from daydreams and mental chatter. According to the Sufis, we naturally wake up several times a day. These instances are called "moments of freedom", but we usually don't recognize them due to the momentum of the sleeping state carrying over through them. They involuntarily slip by. It's not always necessary to take a psychedelic, perform prolonged rituals or meditations, fast, do yoga or otherwise engage in esoteric practices to enter the Bardo, though these don't hurt and can help if done with discipline. You don't have to physically or mentally contort yourself, find a guru or join a cult to construct a path toward higher consciousness.
Traveling through the Bardo, attempting to metaprogram new realities, expanded perceptions, new ways of thinking and doing is not a picnic or a walk in the park despite Illuminatus! literally starting with a walk in New York's Central Park. The Bardo can be terrifying with shocking ambushes, intense radiations, piercing sounds among other gnarly sensations. Chapel Perilous, the Dark Night of the Soul, the ordeal of Crossing the Abyss all occur in this territory. Hence the usefulness of a guide whether it be one's daimon, Holy Guardian Angel or a Book of the Dead of one kind or another – the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams appears one fun and light-hearted example.
Nowadays, we have Films of the Dead. Three of those that immediately come to mind include The Seventh Seal by Ingmar Bergman, Beeteljuice by Tim Burton, and All That Jazz by Bob Fosse. Note that Beeteljuice borrows part of the classic "It's showtime, folks" line from All That Jazz. This three minute and thirty-three second clip gives a taste of the Bardo . . . where all your dreams and nightmares can come true.
The 23 Enigma offers more than a symbol as a bardo indicator. Not every coincidence appears meaningful. 23 can serve as an identifier in a code. Toward the end of chapter 23 in Thomas Pynchon's last novel, Bleeding Edge, there appears what I suspect is an allusion to Robert Anton Wilson's inveterate agnosticism and principle of Maybe Logic interspersed with a few 93s (Thelema adds to 93 making it aka the 93 Current). The CS glyph that I've mentioned once or twice ("slowly cooking", "soon compelling", "cozy schmozy", etc.) runs throughout chapter 23. Pynchon is an acknowledged and brilliant Qabalist. More on the Qabalah in Bleeding Edgehere.
Another instance of 23 as a code identifier appears in Neuromancer by William Gibson. Chapter 23 in that iconic novel opens with: "Molly fished the key out on its loop of nylon." Recall that RAW considered 23 a key number; "out" recalls the "get out" formula from The Book of Lies chapter 23; "fish" indicates the Hebrew letter Nun which corresponds with the Tarot trump Death. Thus, 23 (the Bardo) = a key for Death; "nylon" adds to 210 an important Qabalistic number RAW explicates somewhere in the Historical Illuminatus trilogy, if memory serves: two becomes unified as one then becomes none – a progression that appears a form of death and rebirth. A loop in music describes a passage, usually a drum or percussion phrase, that repeats over and over until stopped. A "loop of nylon" thus symbolizes the repetitive, mystical practice of 210. Entrance into a Bardo space appears obvious in that chapter to those who recognize it. It concludes with a death and rebirth. I wrote more on the 23 Enigma and death in Neuromancer, parallels with Leary's S.M.I.2L.E. formula, and its influence on Pynchon's Bleeding Edge in a post here.
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"ANCIENT EGYPTIAN PAPYRUS DEMONSTRATES
THAT LIFE AFTER DEATH IS WITHIN THE REACH OF EVERYMAN . . .
However, soon the Papyrus starts unrolling very precise instructions
for reaching the Land of the Dead. . .
Just as the Old World mariners suddenly glimpsed a round Earth to be circumnavigated and mapped, so awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death to be created and discovered and charted, open to anybody ready to take a step into the unknown, a step as drastic and irretrievable as the transition from water to land. That step is from word into silence. From Time into Space.
The Pilgrimage to the Western Lands has started, the voyage through the Land of the Dead. Waves of exhilaration sweep the planet. There is hope and purpose in these faces, and total alertness, for this is the most dangerous of all roads, for every pilgrim must meet and overcome his own death."
– William S. Burroughs, The Western Lands, p. 115
"The Magical Universe, MU, is a universe of many gods, often in conflict. So the paradox of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who permits suffering, evil, and death, does not arise.
"What happened, Osiris? We got a famine here."
"Well, you can't win 'em all. Hustling myself."
"Can't you give us immortality?"
"I can get you an extension, maybe. Take you as far as the Duad. You'll have to make it from there on your own. Most of them don't. Figure about one in a million. And, biologically speaking, that's very good odds." – ibid., 113
Bill Laswell and I both agree that The Western Lands is one of William Burroughs' best works. On one level it's a brilliant, direct and highly informative Book of the Dead. My first encounter came from helping record Burroughs reading from it for the Material album Seven Souls. (constructed and produced by Laswell). Apart from Burroughs and Laswell, this manifestation of Material also includes Rammellzee, Foday Musa Suso, Faheim Dandan, Nicky Skopelitis, Simon Shaheen, L. Shankar, Jeff Bova, Sly Dunbar and Aiyb Dieng. In the title track, Burroughs outlines the fate of the different souls in the afterlife, according to Egyptian mythology.
Material Seven Souls
The Western Lands is a collage-like collection of episodes ranging from fictional and science fictional vignettes to auto-biographical moments, dream fragments, old-cut-up experiments, references to his friends, other books and writers, occult experiments, black magic and more. It includes some of his favorite subjects like giant, killer centipedes taking over remote outposts of civilization and the adventures and modus operandi of the Persian mystic leader Hassan i Sabbah; the latter being another Burroughs influence on Robert Anton Wilson who put Sabbah in Illuminatus!.
The connecting theme running throughout is confronting and conquering death. Unlike Bob Wilson, Burroughs doesn't place any stock in prolonging the life expectancy of the physical body ("it's full of holes, it's full of holes"). Rather, he seems to take the approach of training ourselves to become familiar with the Bardo and the ordeals found there; learning how to tolerate and deal with that territory through gradual exposure. The afterlife technology he presents, though largely Egyptian, can come from anywhere.
"The Hindus teach that the Heaven World is more dangerous for the soul than the Hell World, since it is more deceptive and conduces to the fatal error of overconfidence and assumption of immunity. Like a fighter the soul must be constantly in training lest it grow soft on an ephemeral throne."ibid, p. 137
Much of the bardo training value in The Western Lands doesn't come from any advice or data presented. It comes from the bardo scenes, the moods and feelings of that space evoked by Burroughs' visceral descriptions. He frequently gives a taste of this territory gently letting the reader metaphorically dip their toes into the strange, disorientating, sometimes terrifying Land of the Dead. A couple of brief examples:
"The cave system penetrates the mainland for miles. No one knows how far back the tunnels go. Some narrow into dead ends, others open into huge caverns with underground rivers and lakes. There is a deadly stasis of impregnable grandeur, forming a dense medium, difficult to breathe. One suffocates in fairy lands forlorn, magic casements, ruined palaces."ibid, p. 189
"He sees canals and paths and bridges, a network to the sky with an intricate series of locks and sluices, gardens and houseboats pulled by large turtles with eyes for ropes in their shells. The turtles have webbed feet and move with surprising speed and power, pulling barges of produce and passengers.
In the distance he can see a vast lake in milky light. There is no sun or satellite visible. It must be reflected light that gives such a soft, even distribution. Occasionally he meets people on the path. He can feel their bodies as a precise displacement."ibid. p. 244
The poignancy, profundity, and genuinely masterful quality of the writing comes from Burroughs directly confronting his own death in these pages. The Western Lands begins and ends with a semi-autobiographical character, "the old writer." This character had published a novel once that made quite a stir but was never able to finish another one. Now he was humming the refrain to "Dead Man Blues" by Jelly Roll Morton. On page 3 he gives the writer a name: "So William Seward Hall sets out to write his way out of death."
Not only his own death. His dear friend and closest collaborator, the painter Brion Gysin, died the year before this was published. Gysin, the formulator of a consciousness altering device and doorway into the Bardo called the Dreammachine, was the one who introduced him to the cut-up technique. Gysin does get mentioned by name a few times. As does another friend/collaborator and ex-lover, Ian Sommerville who had an untimely death at the age of 36 in a car accident on Burroughs' birthday in 1976. Sommerville was an electronics technician who also collaborated with Gysin to create the Dreammachine in 1961. The year before, Sommerville found a way to program a random sequence generator that Gysin applied to his cut-up technique. Years later, Robert Anton Wilson tried similar experiments with computer software programmed to create random cut-ups that found their way into his book on synchronicity, Coincidance.
On p. 236 WSB writes a Bardo hotel episode: Le Grand Hôtel des Morts where he glimpses Sommerville several times on an escalator or in the corridors or waiting rooms and references his fatal car accident. He asks the front desk girl if Ian Somerville is there. He is and comes out. They "exchange a few dead sentences. It doesn't matter who says what." He then asks if Brion is there, but he isn't.
The strongest reference to Gysin's death occurs in the last episode in the book where the "old writer . . . had reached the end of words, the end of what could be done with words. And then . . ." A distant memory of the British in Gibraltar evokes a bardo scene that ends with a metaphor for clinging to a dying life. The book ends with:
"In Tangier the Parade Bar is closed. Shadows are falling upon the Mountain.
'Hurry up, please. It's time.'"
The Parade Bar was a restaurant in Tangier that Brion Gysin bought, set -up and operated primarily for the purpose of having a regular venue where the Moroccan music he loved could be performed live. These were the Master Musicians of Jajouka from a small village a couple of hours away. The "Mountain" seems a reference to Hassan i Sabbah aka, the Old Man of the Mountain. Burroughs mythologizes Sabbah as the one who breaks the monopoly energy vampires have on the gates to Immortality. The last line is what you hear in British pubs announcing the last call for alcohol before closing for the night. T.S. Eliot used the same line in The Wasteland. It's not clear to me if Burroughs intended to reference The Wasteland, but it would be appropriate if so as that poem appears another excursion into the Bardo. A recurring theme in both this book and Burroughs' philosophy is the breaking out of TIME and expanding into SPACE. I don't know if these were officially his last words: when he had his fatal heart attack and was being taken out of his house on a stretcher he said to his companion, "back in no time."
The Western Lands portrays the Bardo of William S. Burroughs, the documentation of the unraveling of his subconscious mind and making it conscious. The deaths of both his parents turns up in an episode on p. 42. The presence of his son, Bill Burroughs Jr. who tragically died young after a difficult life is there too.
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In chapter 4, Kim Carsons, a Western (as in the old west in the U.S. circa late 19th Century/ early 20th Century) character from WSB's previous novel, The Place of Dead Roads – the second novel in a trilogy that concludes with this novel – is given the assignment to find the Western Lands and find out how the Western Lands are created; he wants to find their blueprints. The Western Lands is what the ancient Egyptians equated with Immortality. Burroughs wants to know why the Egyptians needed to preserve the physical body after death with mummification. He considers it a mistake. Carsons is based on the English writer Denton Welch, but also stands in as another alter ego for WSB. The author frequently breaks the so-called fourth wall with direct references to his writing process. In this case, Kim receives a summons from the District Supervisor to get his assignment, but he wants to know why he isn't the District Supervisor since he wrote him. A snippet of the writer's philosophy on writing follows.
Via a fragment of an ancient Mayan codex, Kim's assignment surrealistically morphs into a search for monster centipedes and the Centipede God. The chapter mixes genuine research and data on centipedes embellished greatly by the author's vivid imagination (we hope it's an embellishment!). Carson journeys into the wilds of the South American island of Esmeraldas in search of the centipede cult. The Guide gets introduced as the one taking the expedition down a river into the jungle though Kim has left the narrative and it's now Neferti leading the voyage.
"The Guide consults his map, which opens like an accordian. The map is brightly colored, depicting unusual beings. Some of them are growing upside down into the ground, shoots sprouting from their legs."
At first only referring to him as The Guide, we soon find out the guide's name is Wilson. This could allude to either Robert Anton and/or Peter Lamborn Wilson. I suspect both – they're both quite obviously very experienced Bardo Guides. The latter gets thanked in the acknowledgements section at the beginning for providing research on Hassan i Sabbah.
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Burroughs affirms synchronicity pretty early on (p. 30) calling it a pregnant concept that replaces the "monumental fraud of cause and effect."
Proof of Concept (maybe)
When Burroughs came to Platinum Island to record excerpts from The Western Lands, I knew very little about him and didn't know what to expect. I bought several of his books beforehand to read up on him, but thanks to a busy studio schedule only had time to read one of them, Junky. It was the first book he wrote and doesn't represent his genius.. I did know of his pioneering literary cut-up techniques and had recently read Robert Anton Wilson's new book, Coincidance, which also contained cut-up experiments generated from computer software. I brought my copy in to show Burroughs after we finished recording. He seemed very interested when leafing through the book so I told him he could keep it. This delighted him immensely. After he and his editor James Grauerholz left the studio they went upstairs to visit his friend the famous grafitti artist Keith Haring whose painting studio was a couple of floors above our recording studio. About 6 or so months later a new Burroughs release called Interzone, comprising Naked Lunch outtakes was accidentally delivered to our studio. It was addressed to Haring. Unfortunately (or not, you never know), Keith had confronted and succumbed to his own death from AIDS in the intervening period. I was there when our studio manager received the mail. "You're into Burroughs, aren't you?" He said to me, "here you have this book, Keith Haring won't be needing it." I'd given a book by Robert Anton Wilson to WSB and somehow, through fate, magic or random chance, a book from him was gifted to me.
That one day meeting and recording William Burroughs is one of the highlights of my career as a sound engineer and one of the highlights of my life. Before he arrived, I half expected a somewhat washed-up character from the 60's. When he left, I felt like I'd met one of the most wise individuals I would ever meet and still feel that's true to this day. I wrote up and posted the experience on this blog slightly more than 14 years ago. The follow-up post is here.
I'll leave you with more bardo words of advice from WSB and music from Bill Laswell's Material. This one comes from the album Hallucination Engine.
Words of Advice for Young People – Material featuring William Burroughs.
