Cosmic Scholar: The Life and Times of Harry Smith

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 a kindred 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, Alberta when 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 and Thelema

 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 story has 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 Law I: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.