Thoughts on Reading Proust Part 2

Singing to the ocean, I can hear the ocean's roar
Play for me, I play for free, I play the whole night long

Sing about the good things and the sun that lights the day

I used to sing for the ocean, has the ocean lost its way? (I don't think so)

- Led Zeppelin, The Ocean, Madison Square Garden, 1973

The expressed world is made of differential relations and of contiguous singularities.

- Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense

A philosopher who was not sufficiently modern for her, Leibniz, has said that the journey from the intellect to the heart is a long one.  - Marcel Proust, Sodom and Gomorrah, In Search of Lost Time Vol. 4

As far as I can tell, the last quote appears a fabrication by Proust, therefore making it interesting to speculate why he chose one of the inventors of calculus to deliver that information, a philosopher also known for his theory of the monad.  "Leibniz held the famous thesis that each individual monad expresses the world" (Deleuze, LoS).  Leibnez may have been chosen simply for his intellectual brilliance, to become that luminous and expressive with the intelligence of the heart makes for a long journey, takes a long time, then again, traveling through In Search of Lost Time also constitutes a long bardo journey.  Or maybe Leibnez did say it, and no one noticed but Proust?

On one level, In Search of Lost Time provides an education for what G. I. Gurdjieff called the Emotional Centrum.  Contemporary mainstream culture, for the most part, doesn't acknowledge the complexity and power of this centrum to act as a brain as equally, if not more, complex, nuanced, and motive than the Intellectual Centrum.  "And later when my "I," that is, this "something unknown" which in ancient times a certain eccentric — called by those around him a "learned (wo)man," as we still call such persons — defined as a "relatively mobile arising, depending on the quality of functioning of the thought, feeling and organic automatism." (Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson, translation modified).

Many tools, resources, programs and facilities - libraries, colleges, universities, Think Tanks etc. exist to educate the mind, the intellect, however we desire.  Now, you can type in any subject to google and receive knowledge at your fingertips.  It also seems relatively easy to educate and improve the physical mechanism, the organic automatism, i. e. the body which also has a unique intelligence, it has its own brain, the nervous system.

Education of the heart can happen with an effort to engage with Art.  Repeat as necessary; difference and repetition.  Music, literature, paintings, etc. generate aesthetics that open up tracks into new territories reaching far beyond the semantic symbol systems and rationalism of the thinking centrum.  So does learning to play an instrument, writing a story or making a drawing.  Most people appear unaware of this vast unknown territory and the power it may enable.  The power to create.  Just like you can study, research and experiment with a science until becoming an expert, or like achieving exceptional physical fitness, discipline and mastery over the body at a gym, dojo, or ashram, the same intensity of applied effort can yield equally dramatic results for opening the feeling centrum.  And it all  seems cumulative, even with setbacks, it all comes back with persistence.

Gurdjieff designated the expanded, mostly undiscovered and unrealized territory and intelligence of the heart as the Higher Emotional Centrum.  Timothy Leary, his heir apparent in the taxonomy of consciousness, called it the neuro-electric circuit (C6) acknowledging it as a "brain" that received and transmitted electrically.  

Reminiscing on the women he has loved, the narrator, Proust, says:

"Yet my one joy was to see them, my one anxiety to wait for them.  It was as if a virtue having no connection with them had been adjoined to them incidentally by nature, and that this virtue, this electricity-like power, had the effect on me of exciting my love, that is to say of directing all my actions and causing all my sufferings.  But from this, the beauty, or the intelligence, or the the goodness of these women was wholly distinct.  As though by an electric current that moves you, I have been shaken by my love affairs, I have lived them, I have felt them; never have I succeeded in seeing them or thinking them. 

- The Guermantes Way, Vol. 3

If we take the word "heart" in the Leibnez quote to mean the Higher Emotional centrum, then it certainly makes for a long journey for the intellect to get there.  Once there, you then need to learn to stay and how to function there, to not get completely stunned or frightened by the experience, the increased intensities and hyper sensitivities.  Much of what I've read of Proust reveals a sense of that territory and how to manage there.    

"Then my grandmother came in , and to the expansion of my ebbing heart there opened at once an infinity of space.

... I knew, when I was with my grandmother, that however great the misery that there was in me, it would be received by her with a pity still more vast; that everything that was mine, my cares, my wishes, would be, in my grandmother, supported upon a desire to save and prolong my life that was stronger than mine own; and my thoughts were continued in her without having to undergo any deflection, since they passed from my mind into hers without change of atmosphere or of personality.

I threw myself into the arms of my grandmother and clung with my lips to her face as though I had access thus to that immense heart which she opened to me. And when I felt my mouth glued to her cheeks, to her brow, I drew from them something so beneficial, so nourishing that I lay in her arms as motionless, as solemn as calmly gluttonous as a babe at the breast." 

- Within A Budding Grove, Vol. 2

Gurdjieff would say, it's definitely not all "roses, roses" we find many thorns there too.  Increased sensitivity applies to both pain and joy with whole range of emotions and mixture in between.  Proust has an incredible ability to explore all the degrees and various intensities of emotional flows.  Just as, if not more, important he shows how emotions of all kinds non-verbally communicate, through signs.

Deciphering signs shows one major way the intellect journeys to the heart.  Gilles Deleuze writes:

Learning is essentially concerned with signs.  Signs are the object of a temporal apprenticeship, not of an abstract knowledge. To learn is first of all to consider a substance, an object, a being as if it emitted signs to be deciphered, interpreted.  There is no apprentice who is not 'the Egyptologist' of something. One becomes a carpenter only by becoming sensitive to the signs of wood, a physician by becoming sensitive to the signs of disease. Vocation is always predestination with regard to signs.  Everything that teaches us something emits signs; every act of learning is an interpretation of signs or hieroglyphs.  Proust's work is not based on the exposition of memory, but on the apprenticeship to signs.

...

Everything exists in those obscure zones we penetrate as into crypts, in order to decipher hieroglyphs and secret languages.  The Egyptologist, in all things, is the (wo)man who undergoes initiation — the apprentice.

- Proust and Signs, p. 4 

His comment about the apprentice connects with this quote from the Overture in Swann's Way which talks about degrees of emotion around love:

"— to him that anguish came through Love, to which in a sense it is predestined, by which it must be equipped and adapted; but when, as had befallen me, such an anguish possesses one's soul before Love has entered one's life, then it must drift, awaiting Love's coming, vague and free, without precise attachment, at the disposal of one sentiment to-day, of another to-morrow, of filial pity or affection for a comrade.  And the joy with which I first bound myself apprentice ..."

"Alas! in the freshest flower it is possible to discern those just perceptible signs which to the instructed mind indicate already what will be, by the dessication or fructification of the flesh that is to-day in bloom, the ultimate form, immutable and already predestinate of the autumnal seed." 

 - Within A Budding Grove

* * * * * * 

Of all the arts, perhaps good music provides the optimum way to access higher states of consciousness; to educate the heart, the higher emotional centrum that serves as Grand Central Station for tracks into unknown new territories.  I may be biased, though Deleuze said he wrote philosophy only because he couldn't play the music that would express his ideas.  Most, if not all, great literary writers have some musical component in their writing and/or write about music.  We find a great deal of music in Proust.  

In this passage, from Sodom and Gomorrah, ISoLT Vol. 4, the narrator grieves for his grandmother, not long dead, at Balbec, a summer resort town they stayed at some years past.  At the time, he felt very anxious about staying in a strange place so his grandmother told him to knock on the partition separating their quarters and she would be right over.  It shows the connection between music and the subtleties of emotion as well as how emotions communicate through signs.

I turned toward the wall, but, alas, against me was the partition that had served of old between us as a morning messenger, that partition which, docile as a violin in rendering all the nuances of a feeling, spoke so exactly to my grandmother of my fear both of waking her up, or if she was already awake, of not being heard by her, and of her not daring to move, then at once, like a second instrument taking it up, announcing her coming and exhorting me to stay calm.  I no more dared to approach that partition than a piano on which my grandmother had been playing and that was vibrating still from her touch.  

The last line use a musical analogy to illustrate the emotional reaction triggered by the partition and the depth of the narrator's grief.  

The Guermantes Way, Volume 3 of our saga, has a scene towards the end that shocks the younger narrator when he receives the  full wrath of a prominent society figure, M. de Charlus, whom he barely knows, for an imagined wrong.  The whole confrontation gets compared by both characters at different moments to aspects of symphonic music.  For instance, we feel the emotional intensity, the fear in the air, when hearing:

(His normally forceful voice, which tended to make people turn in the street, was a hundred times more forceful as a forte is when played by an orchestra rather than on the piano, and changed to a fortissimo at the same time.  M. de Charlus roared.)

This violent outburst takes the narrator completely by surprise and thrusts him into unknown, chaotic territory.  Will he be able to keep it together?  Not really.

Almost everything else was the result of a feeling yet unknown to me, and which I could not therefore be blamed for underestimating.  In the absence of my familiarity with this feeling, I could at least, had I remembered Mme de Guermante's words, assumed an element of madness in this pride of his.  But at the time, the element of madness did not cross my mind. As I saw it, he was filled merely with pride, I merely with fury.

Violent actions ensue, the narrator in his fury destroys his accuser's top hat.  They argue for a few pages then de Charlus starts to calm down though still lecturing condescendingly to the narrator.  First we see him directing the narrator's attention to paintings to shift the mood, then Proust blatantly and synchronisticly brings  music into the scene to start resolving the dischord; de Charlus speaking to the narrator:

"If this sort of beauty appeals to you more, here is a rainbow by Turner beginning to shine out between these two Rembrandts, as a sign of our reconciliation.  Can you hear?  Beethoven has come to join him." And indeed, the first chords of the third movement of the Pastoral Symphony, "Joy After the Storm," could be heard, performed somewhere close by, on the first floor perhaps by a group of musicians.  "There you are, one never knows.  One really never knows.  Invisible music."

Proust gives music a central role early in the novel when he makes a musical passage, the Vinteuil Sonata, a mnemonic device with for the love Charles Swann has for his paramour Odette, later to be his wife.  This piece of music and the feeling it conjures recurs both literally and figuratively a few times in Swann's Way.

Some Preliminary Thoughts on Reading Marcel Proust

Dancing days are here again

As the summer evenings grow

I got my flower, I got my power

I got a woman who knows.

I said it's alright, you know it's alright

I guess it's all in my heart

You'll be my only, my one and only

Is that the way it should start?

- Led Zeppelin's Proust inspired lyrics

To be honest, I can't be certain that Proust had anything to do with these lyrics. Yet the fact remains that Zeppelin did name their music label Swan Song and the first volume in Proust's magnum opus, In Search of Lost Time is called Swann's Way.  Further, a swan song comes from an Ancient Greek phrase to indicate the last gesture, effort or performance before death.  Charles Swann, the character who provides the Way in the title is one of only two protagonists who die in the first four volumes of ISoLT – as far I've reached in my reading.  Swann's death doesn't get considered much, unlike the narrator's Grandmother, but we do get one poignant scene  in the third volume where Swann tells his friends the Guermantes about his poor health and limited time, the narrator grasps the gravity of the moment, but the Duc seems to not care and prioritizes rushing off to a party.  His wife, the Duchess, seems torn between the two positions, wishing to stay and talk to Swann, but being dragged away by her husband.  This turned out to be Swann's swan song in the novel.   Zeppelin's Swan Song began life as an unrealized epic instrumental piece by Jimmy Page before lending its name to their fledgling music label.  The irony of using a phrase indicating imminent death for a new record label may relate to Mr. Page's "reading and research" into the Golden Dawn and Aleister Crowley's Thelema which confront death full on with material from The Egyptian Book of the Dead among other sources.  

I'm not aware of Proust using Kaballah in his writing, it seems coincidental that he uses a variant of the name Swann that includes an extra n, a letter that corresponds with Death in the Tarot.   The bird swan corresponds with the path of Daleth - Venus, the Goddess of love.  The mystically inclined, Qabalistically informed Jimmy Page likely enjoyed that pun for his bands record label.  Swan also corresponds to "Success in Bhakti yoga."  This line of reasoning may appear fanciful, however I'll demonstrate the relevance to ISoLT in due time, as we search for it. 

Still, 12 pages in to the 4,215 page epic journey,  Proust makes death explicit and it involves Swann's father.  The narrator's grandfather tells the story of "the behavior of Swann the elder upon the death of his wife, by whose bedside he had watched day and night."  The grandfather went to visit the widower and "managed to entice him for a moment, weeping profusely, out of the death-chamber, so that he should not be present when the body was laid in its coffin.  They took a turn or two in the park where there was a little sunshine.  Suddenly M. Swann seized my grandfather by the arm and cried, Oh my dear old friend, how fortunate we are here to be walking together on such a charming day! Don't you see how pretty they all are, all these trees — my hawthorns ..."  The last line sounds plain, yet it actually telegraphs a major theme in the novel - don't you see how pretty all the trees and vegetation, the flowers and fauna, the foliage, the sky, the clouds, the way the drapes hang, and eventually everything animate or inanimate: Don't you see how pretty they all are? Wake up to the beauty all around.  Interesting that this affirmation of life comes in an interlude from death.  Indeed,  M. Swann goes on to say that it's good to be alive before suddenly remembering his wife and retreating back into grief.  The narrator expresses the inclination to negatively judge M. Swann until hearing his grandfather "exclaim, 'But after all, he had a heart of gold.'"

I had made my way through about  3/4s of Swann's Way before hunkering down for the pandemic lockdown. Preparations for the hermitage included picking up the next three volumes, Within A Budding Grove, The Guermantes Way and Sodom and Gomorrah.  A couple of weeks later, making my way through that Budding Grove, a band on Facebook offered to take requests to play a feel-good cover.  Dancing Days came to mind, I listened to Zeppelin's live version and experienced a strong resonance to the Proust of the moment.

Swan Song label

The conflation of girls and flowers and the power this brings receives much attention in the second volume, titled, in the new Penguin Classics translation,  In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. The stage has already been set in Swann's Way with the walks he takes in the Combray section; the narrator gives extremely lucid, illuminated and detailed descriptions of nature scenes and flowers to the point of deifying them:

"But farther on the current slackened, where the stream ran through a property thrown open to the public by it's owner, who had made a hobby of aquatic gardening, so that the little ponds in which the Vivonne was here diverted were aflower with water-lilies.  As the banks at this point were thickly wooded, the heavy shade of the trees gave the water a background which was ordinarily dark green, although sometimes when we were coming home on a calm evening after a stormy afternoon, I have seen in it's color a clear, crude blue that was almost violet, suggesting a floor of Japanese cloisonné.  Here and there,  on the surface, floated, blushing like a strawberry, the scarlet heart of a lily set in a ring of white petals."

A common comment by people speaking of the effects they get reading Proust: it will change your life.  It can certainly change how you look at the world.  Flora and nature make a good example.  To see the plant life with the detail, depth and lucidity Proust gives them, to see them with enlightened vision becomes a spiritual exercise.  They used to say, take a psychedelic to see a vision that you then can learn to reach naturally.  With a close, attentive reading of Proust, no need for the psychedelic.

To give one example amongst several available, in Volume 2, the adolescent narrator has his attention captured by a group of young girls in the coastal resort town, Balbec. "Never among actresses,  nor among peasants,  nor among girls from a convent school had I beheld anything so beautiful, impregnated with so much that was unknown, so inestimably precious, so apparently inaccessible. 

 ... But in that case I could only blame the compulsion of a law of nature — which if it applied to these girls would apply to all — and not the imperfection of the object.  For it was that which I should have chosen above all others, feeling quite certain with a botanists satisfaction, that it was not possible to find collected anywhere rarer specimens than these young flowers ..."  he goes on to describe the girls as blocking his view of the sea while watching a steamer slowly pass through them "like an idle butterfly dawlding in the cup of a flower."  If looking at this archetypally, which he invites the reader to do, the fire of the obvious sexual attraction combines with the water of the sea and the receptivity of the flower cups slowly produces the alchemically motive power of steam, like a butterfly - transformation.  Flower power indeed!

Two contemporary writers and researchers of the occult, Robert Anton Wilson and Kenneth Grant advertised this line of flight.  In hist first novel, Illuminatus! written with Robert Shea they use the slogan Ewige Blumenkraft, German for "flower power forever" as a password for the Illuminati.  In trying to decipher why they used this phrase, the Wikipedia Intelligence suggests it seems likely a joke, a poke at the hippies, but they also say: "Another possibility is that the rose and lotus flower are an important symbol of spiritual development in both the western and eastern mystery schools."

Kenneth Grant takes it further with his ideas about kalas, sacred emanations, a strong presence in his books Aleister Crowley & The Hidden God and The Magical Revival.  In chapter 7 of the latter, titled Star Fire,  Grant writes about zones of energy on the body:  They are symbolized generally by the lotus which is the typical flower or flow-er; the flowing that one gathers together all the mystical essences, "stars" or kalas, of the human body... The Lotus comprising all these currents, all these essences, flowers in the  emanations that flow from the priestess.  It is with these subtle emanations, magnetized by appropriate manual passes as they travel along the occult arteries of the invisible anatomy, that the rites are performed and the magical talismans consecrated.  ... kala also means time.  Time and periodicity are associated with the lunar cycle of the female."  Bringing us back to In Search of Lost Time. 

In 1918 C. S. Jones,  aka Frater Achad composed a document known as Liber 31 that purported to show the Key to The Book of the Law, then known as Liber Legis and sent it to Aleister Crowley.  Crowley accepted this as the key, changing the name of Liber Legis to Liber AL vel Legis to reflect the new information.  AL = 31.  Crowley's response to Achad said, "Your key opens Palace.  CCXX (The Book of the Law) has unfolded like a flower."  Achad later became known for declaring that the feminine Aeon of Maat arrived shortly after Crowley died.  You could call that wishful thinking, I think it hasn't arrived yet.  The point being that Proust, busy writing ISoLT at the time, may have tapped into an occult current that may have helped inform his work.  

My love she laughs like the flowers, Valentines can't buy her.

 - Bob Dylan, Love Minus Zero/No Limit

Salvador Dali, Surrealist Flower Girl

To be continued ...

Robert Anton Wilson's Quest To Turn On the World

by A Student

 

In a jailhouse interview, Timothy Leary responded to a question asking if he was trying to change the world with his activities in the 1960s: “Yes, we were trying to change the world.  We knew the odds were against us, but we had a sense of humor about it.”  For his efforts, Leary got rewarded with trumped up drug charges resulting in enforced retreats in multiple jails and prisons.  He lived for months on the run as a fugitive before getting illegally kidnapped in Afghanistan by the U.S. authorities who placed him in solitary confinement next to Charlie Manson in Folsom Prison.  Richard Nixon had named him the most dangerous man in America.  His compadre in the conspiracy of Higher Intelligence, Robert Anton Wilson, took a less public, more low-key approach to the same mission.  In spite of facing significant social challenges by going against the grain of economic slavery and following his own vision, Wilson managed to not get burned at the stake, locked up, or vilified in the tabloid press like several of his predecessors.  He knew how to keep silent and the necessity of that for effective communication.  The Greek God Harpocrates, pictured as a babe on a lotus flower, forefinger to lips in the gesture of silence, represents the god of protection.

 

I am not aware of Robert Anton Wilson ever directly expressing an intention to transform the world.  He did carry a life-long interest and transmission of the work presented by Aleister Crowley while distancing himself from Crowley’s personal philosophies:

 

“It is this synthesis of Eastern and Western occult traditions with modern scientific method that is probably Crowley’s major achievement.  His notorious anti-Christian philosophy – a blend of Nietzsche Supermanism and anarcho-fascist Darwinism – is quite distinct from his methodology.  Whether you like that philosophy or not (and the Libertarian does not), you can still use the methodology of research Crowley devised” (Cosmic Trigger I, p. 70 Hilaritas Press).

 

Later in the book, he tells the story of meeting a clown in the park named Parcifal doing Sufi exercises as part of his routine.  Parcifal accurately predicts that RAW will soon find his son whom he’s looking for.  RAW later looks up his name: “By Cabalah, Parcifal = 418 = ‘The Great Work Accomplished,’ i.e. the total awakening of all humanity” (CT I p. 102).  This appears to be Wilson’s unique interpretation of the Great Work, I’ve not encountered it elsewhere in quite that formulation. 

 

A few pages later while discussing the Cabala of The Book of the Law he returns to 418:

 

“The second major number in the book is 418, which, ‘coincidentally’ is the number of Crowley’s home in Inverness, Scotland.  Its standard cabalistic meaning is ‘the Great Work accomplished,” or the Illumination of all humanity.”    Crowley has a lot to say about 418 in Sepher Sephiroth, this number has the most extensive entry in the whole book, but nowhere does he say it indicates the “Illumination of all humanity,” though that certainly makes a valid conclusion, RAW’s conclusion.  He continues:

 

“Crowley interpreted this to mean that his mission was not to illuminate a few, as other gurus have done and are doing, but to set in motion occult forces which would result in the illumination of all, by the end of this century; 418 is also the number of ‘Parcifal,’ the Sufi whose life so oddly intersected mine in that mad summer of 1973” (CT I, p. 111)

 

I’ve been reading Crowley and the secondary literature consistently for many years without encountering that interpretation RAW attributes to him.  Recall that 40 pages earlier, he distanced himself from Crowley’s philosophies while aligning himself to his methodology.  One of those methods includes playing fast and loose with facts in order to transmit a particular piece of Intelligence. 

 

Boleskine, the name of the house Crowley owned near Inverness adds to 418.  Though subtle, RAW deliberately calls it the number of Crowley’s home without referring to it by name.  He then connects it with the Sufis, in particular, someone doing Sufi exercises in the park. 

418 also = “Servans misericordiam” which translates as “keeping kindness,” or “keeping compassion.”  The root of the second syllable of the second word, “cordi” = heart.  Boleskine, now in preservation and restoration after multiple fires ravaged it, lies very near to the geographical center of the Scottish Highlands. 

 

Cosmic Trigger I appeared relatively early in Wilson’s literary career.  We find similar sentiments expressed in the last novel he wrote, Nature’s God.  This note from Sigismundo’s Wilderness Journal sounds like it might be autobiographical:

 

“I ran away from the Priory because I cannot waste time being an Emperor.  I have more important work to do.  I want to become the concert master for future evolution” (NG, p. 128, Hilaritas Press)

 

Later, Sigismundo explains the intentions of the “Free Builders” to the indigenous shaman who seems both his friend and enemy:

 

“They wished to cure not just suffering individuals but the entire suffering race of humanity.  It was their aim to help all humans walk through the gate of the four quarters and become like gods.” (NG, p. 161).

 

* * * * * *

 

From his work, it appears that Robert Anton Wilson’s efforts toward illuminating humanity consisted of showing people how they could turn themselves on, how they could proceed towards transforming their lives into whatever they desired; how they could move in and out of different ideological spaces, increase their intelligence, and live longer, not only physically, but vitally.  In the field of voluntary evolution, he showed a remarkable talent for transferring and transforming technology from a variety of sources, taking information and methods, integrating them with his own practices, strategies, and experimentation to eventually communicate them back out from the understanding of personal experience personally experienced.  The legacy of his philosophical research gave the world Maybe Logic and Model Agnosticism, approaches to making sense of life forever associated with his name, explained well elsewhere, only as far away as an internet search engine.  His tinkering with and ceaseless trumpeting of the 8 Circuit Model of Consciousness, originally conceived by the good Doctor Leary, remains his most extroverted and recurring example of broadcasting a set of tools for conscious change.

 

Like the jazz guru bandleader Sun Ra (see the documentary, A Joyful Noise) whose name they both shared, RAW valorized the Unknown.  His excursions outside the domains of the norm and into new territories sometimes led to startling events and conclusions far outside acceptable scientific consensual realities.  Rather than invalidating them, or reducing them to a psychological or sociological profile, he appeared ok with ultimately remaining agnostic about the nature of these discoveries.  His skepticism seems as legendary as his willingness to stay open to any possibility.

 

* * * * * *

 

The technology I have personally benefited the most from RAW is magick.  Magick is spelled with a “k” to distinguish itself from stage magic and illusions although both of those can help with magick.  It’s also forever associated with Aleister Crowley who revitalized that spelling.  Crowley based his magick on the Golden Dawn while significantly modifying and expanding it.

Crowley’s most significate accomplishments don’t appear to be his not inconsiderable mystical and magical attainments, but rather his ability to communicate the methods and schema where you can do that for yourself, or in his words, produce Christs.  RAW based his magick on Crowley’s while significantly modifying and expanding it in his way.  I’ve come to understand Crowley through RAW and to get a better grasp of RAW through his understanding of Crowley.

 

Significant magickal instruction appears in every single book I’ve ever read by Wilson, particularly in his fiction where you’ll find it usually coded, though he helps the attentive reader crack the code.  In the spirit of pearls before swine, he doesn’t seem interested in freely giving out esoteric data, rather he makes the reader, the student, work to discover and realize it for themselves. This appears one intention behind Guerilla Ontology, or Operation Mindfuck: feed the system with blatantly false information, then less blatantly, dubious information that may or may not be true in order to get the reader to think for themselves, not blindly accept everything or anything the Author/Teacher says without question.  Balanced skepticism seems the first order of business in a career of magick.  When RAW taught Crowley 101 online in 2005, during the 101^st anniversary of the reception of The Book of the Law, the first essay he assigned for study was The Soldier and the Hunchback, Crowley’s dialectic between certitude, as represented by the Soldier (!) and doubt from the Hunchback (?).

 

For the past several years, RawIllumination.org has often hosted weekly discussion groups usually featuring one of Wilson’s books.  By reading a tiny chunk, this weekly voyage through a small portion of his literary world enables the iso-magnification of the text to reveal more of the depth of his transmission than you might get from reading straight through without feedback and analysis.  His books seem ideal for reading slowly and contemplatively and makes for a great deal of fun for people like myself who love to solve literary puzzles and who love to learn.

 

Much of the magick in his fiction remains to get discovered.  I comment extensively in the group discussions only limited by available time; I perceive much more than I can comment on and I miss a lot that other people notice.  Since I see much more now than in past readings, I can reasonably expect additional didactic tracks currently unknown to me to come up with further study in the future. 

 

RAW is my first and primary teacher of magick.  Through him I met E.J. Gold whom I’ve learned a lot from indirectly, mostly by example.  Like Crowley and RAW, Gold uses guerilla ontology, communicates on multiple levels and has fluency with Qabalah.  One of the first things Gold told me is that 50% of what he says about the Work is a lie.  That makes it a 50/50 chance that the figure of 50% is a lie if you accept the statement as true.  Sometimes it seems a much higher number.  Gold and RAW were friends.  There are a couple of sets of recorded talks they did together at a 4^th Way Convention in 1980 in San Francisco.  Gold once told me that he and RAW were in the same School together. 

 

Circa 2003 or 2004 Gold suggested that I reread The Golden Apple, the second book of the Illuminatus! Trilogy.  I decided to read the whole thing and experienced new strata of previously opaque Qabalistic imagery open up.  When that finished, I received a strong intuitive sign from the environment to go on, so I continued with Schrodinger’s Cat. That coincided with an intense period of my life that felt like going through Chapel Perilous while also producing a jazz record in Paris.  I experienced so many synchronicities with events toward the end of the book and events in my daily life that it felt like I was living inside the novel, or the novel had jumped outside its pages to encompass my entire world.  It’s hard to describe, definitely reset some neural wiring and increased my respect for the power of the word.

 

Lon Milo Duquette is a teacher who played an invaluable role in my education, initially with his book, The Magick of Thelema, now called The Magick of Aleister Crowley, A Handbook of Rituals of Thelema.  The title speaks for itself.  In one of his books, Duquette calls RAW his hero. 

 

I have held a great affinity for the writings of Crowley since I first read the Equinox and the Confessions at the age of 22.  It took a long time and the help of the above to fully penetrate his presentation and I’m still learning.  RAW’s communication of magick bypasses Thelemic administration and a lot of the formalisms, generally getting to the heart of the matter while adding his own twists.  The process of understanding the magick in Wilson’s writings seems similar to the process called the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel.  Both cases require a feedback loop between subject and object.  You read his writings, they can inspire a change of some kind, new habits, new experiments, new attitudes that make you a little smarter, funnier, and more sensitive to a greater range of energy.  You read or reread more of his writings and comprehend significantly more, leading to different changes; the process of growth.  With the HGA, it seems the creation or discovery of a spiritual guide through exercising intuition.  Like both RAW’s fiction and nonfiction, the HGA communicates often through Qabalah.  One can learn to establish lines of communication with whatever that is by studying RAW.  Synchronicities appear key to this type of communication.  Information can be received through coincidences.  You can learn about yourself through observing how you interpret them.

 

I will go so far as to say that RAW forged a link with the Secret Chiefs for anyone making the effort … just making the effort! of understanding his books from the perspective of magick.

As an adept, RAW knew how to invoke.  Meaning he knew how to draw into his writings Intelligence beyond his own personal knowledge.  I asked him about the Secret Chiefs and he told me “they are a useful metaphor.”  I infer from this response that he used this metaphor to some advantage.  I’ve also found it a useful metaphor.  It once got me into a personal message dialogue with Kenneth Grant less than a year before he died. 

 

The spiritual path seems a construction, as given in the contemporary iteration of the tradition RAW speaks from.  Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law, can mean figure it out for yourself, forge and follow the path you create; follow your bliss as Joseph Campbell suggests.  Take what you find and use it the best you can.  Improvise, if you don’t have a wand, use your finger or a stick of incense.  Magick, the way RAW presented it, doesn’t have a rigid, proper, formal way of doing things.  You are free to improvise. Magick defines itself as a Science and Art, some seem to overlook the latter, some overlook both.  RAW emphasized and balanced the two.  In Cosmic Trigger I he quotes Nietzsche as saying, “we are all greater artists than we realize” (p. 28).  Nietszche didn’t exactly say that, or maybe we read different translations?  In what I saw, Nietzsche implies this without the clarity RAW artistically transforms his words into. 

 

Immediately following this quote we find a brilliant statement about magick, one very accurate and true in my experience:

 

“Learning to remember the invisible donkey who carries us about — the self-programmer — is the first step in awakening from conditioned, mechanical consciousness to true, objective consciousness.  Whether or not there are fairies, elves, and extra-terrestrials hiding behind every bush, awakening reveals that the universe is full of invisible intelligence.  It is very hard for us to learn to contact that intelligence without clothing it in projected humanoid forms” CT I, p. 28)

 

The spiritual path appears an eclectic construction to the scientific and artistic traveler.  In Cosmic Trigger I, Wilson provides a great deal of raw material, hints, formulas, programs and suggestions for initiating the construction of this path;  actually, in many of his books.  “Buildung supra buildung” as Joyce puns in Finnegans Wake.  The 8 Circuit model provides a framework to hang your soul on with enough information, particularly, in The Game of Life, to build a super highway to the stars, metaphorically speaking.  Different types of people get drawn to different materials and methods.  There’s something for everyone.  Model agnosticism allows the freedom to pick and choose.

 

Crowley’s system seems opens source code – he allows variation, improvisation and experimentation.  He emphasizes the creative, artistic side in his chapter, The Circle from Magick Book 4: “… the scope of any (wo)man’s work depends upon their own original genius.”

The focus of his system gets quickly revealed in Liber E., the first set of exercises in The Equinox:

“6. The experimenter is encouraged to use his own intelligence, and to not rely upon other person or persons, however distinguished, even among ourselves.”  That seems a reiteration of the intention behind RAW’s use of Guerilla Ontology.

 

The kind of magick most often found in Wilson’s books is theurgic, which he once defined as magick intended to raise consciousness.  Thaumaturgic magick, magick intended to change the environment appears less common and seems usually done in the service of theurgic magick, of raising consciousness.  We find thaumaturgic magick in the manifesting quarters exercise, the first exercise in Prometheus Rising.  I have found the training of attention to visualize in that way very useful for manifesting parking spaces in crowded cities.  I got the idea to try this after ex-Merry Prankster Mountain Girl said she always calls upon the Parking Angel to find her a spot and it works.

 

Robert Anton Wilson’s final novel, Nature’s God contains an extensive, quantity unknown, treasure trove of both coded and uncoded magical information.  It begins bluntly with a quote from Nietzsche: “The world itself is the will to power — and nothing else!  And you yourself are the will to power — and nothing else!”  Power in the sense of the power to do, the power to act, not simply react, the power to create; not power over others.  This connects to the True Will of the Thelemites and to the self-programmer in the quote above.  It takes Will to awaken at will.  Will and intention seem both keys to magick. 

 

The awakened individual seems turned on from an electrical point of view, like a light switch.  To turn on the world, provide the tools, methods, motivations, mysteries, maps and philosophies for each individual to turn themselves on as thou wilt, along with significant doses of humorous entertainment to help the medicine go down. 

 

The proof of the pudding, speaking mathematically of course, is in the eating of it.  RAW, a product of his work, exemplifies genius … in the original Latin sense of the word, from the verb gignere – to give birth, to bring forth.  This will likely sound politically incorrect, but I recognize Robert Anton Wilson as a spiritual Master.  This doesn’t mean he was a perfect human being (an oxymoron if ever I heard one), or a Saint or a Guru or that he never got annoyed with people.  Crowley was a spiritual Master who completely sucked at relationships.  It means, among other things, that he had an ability for specialized communication, he could, in the words of the Sufis, transmit baraka.  I know this from direct experience, I wrote a blog about it.

It confirmed for me that this could happen over the internet.  Baraka can be found in his written materials, but it has to get unlocked.  

 

More evidence of adeptship can be found in the prognosticating Intelligences he conjures into his books.  Wilson has talked about a scene in Illuminatus! similar in content to the Jonestown massacre that occurred a few years later.  I found it more startling to find the gematria of the historical graffiti that appears all over a chapter in The Widow’s Son adds to a number equivalent to the word “crown.”  The King of Spain makes his one and only appearance in the Historical Illuminatus Chronicles at the beginning of this chapter in relation to the graffiti hence “corona,” the Spanish word for crown.  No prediction of a virus, but the plague becomes part of the set elsewhere.  The graffiti represents an early meme meant to disarm the Pope whenever he sees it as it predicts the timing of his death.  RAW introduces Thomas Paine near the close of The Widow’s Son and makes a pun with the closing words which I interpreted as learning to deal with pain cheerfully; I pointed out other allusions to strategies for dealing with pain in those closing pages.  We read that maybe a week or two before the lockdown due to the corona virus.  Our society has gone through a great deal of collective pain ever since, it has yet to let up in any significant way and might be getting worse. 

 

In Nature’s God, Sigismundo Celine on a retreat in the 18^th Century American wilderness, makes the offhand prediction: “By 2020, autokinotons may even fly to the moon” (NG p. 127 Hilaritas Press).  By very simple Qabalistic computation: “By 2020 = b(2) + 20 + 20 = 42.  According to Crowley: “This number 42 is the Great Number of the Curse … This number is said to be all hotch-potch and accursed” (The Book of Lies p. 95).  This gives an accurate assessment of the current year.  The terribleness of 42 gets elaborated upon elsewhere, but we hardly need to read more when we can just look at what goes on right now outside our windows and on our networks.  We’re living it.  The notarikon, the addition of the initials, in the second phrase = 110 which might suggest the final secret of the Illuminati to anyone who looks up 110 in Sepher Sephiroth found in the back of Crowley’s Qabalah dictionary, 777.  It radiates RAW’s optimism as we travel through the current cultural Chapel Perilous.  This interpretation seems more plausible than a lot of the ones I’ve seen attempting to read Nostradamus’ quatrains into historical events.

 

Chapter 38 from The Book of Lies might be where RAW derived the interpretation of the Great Work as illuminating all humanity.  One of the most straightforward and informative books on magic is The Tree of Life by Israel Regardie.  RAW and Regardie corresponded.  Regardie wrote an introduction to Prometheus Rising.

 

In the words of the Master: “I can say this so simply in music, but when I try to say it in words only paradox and nonsense approximate to what I mean” (NG p. 133).  I’ll then close with a musical suggestion. I don’t know how much RAW appreciated The Beatles but he and Shea did put a Yellow Submarine in Illuminatus! Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band Reprise into A Day in the Life.

 

“We’re Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band we hope you have enjoyed the show …’.

 

” A crowd of people turned away, but I just had to look, having read the book

 

I’d love to turrrnnnnn yoooouuu on.”

 

 

 -       Oz Fritz

NEW MUSIC: Jump With Johnny

And if you don't know what it's all about
Come to me and I'll show you how
We'll do it fast, we'll do it slow
Then you'll know the walk everywhere you go.

- Jimmy McCracklin, The Walk

I'm proud to announce an exciting new release by Johnny Boyd backed up by his Genuine Gentlemen Band,  Jump With Johnny, a six song EP  guaranteed to get your toes a-tapping and your body shakin' with a fresh breath of old rock 'n roll.  A autographed  cd copy and a couple of track previews is available HERE.  Can't wait?  You can get an mp3 download NOW.  Co-produced and mixed with great aplomb and love by Yours Truly.

The musicians:

Johnny Boyd - lead vocals
Ji Tanzer - drums and percussion, background vocals, production assistance
Allen Hunter - upright bass
Mike Elson - piano, backing vocals
A.G. Donatella - electric guitar, backing vocals
Willie Matheis - tenor saxophone

Rusty Blake - pedal steel guitar

Roberto Medina - congas

Keith Brush - backing vocals

Patti King - backing vocals

Production credits:

Produced by Oz Fritz and Johnny Boyd

Executive Producer: Angela Strand

Recorded by Larry Crane at Jackpot Recording Studio, Portland, OR

Mixed by Oz Fritz at Ancient Wave Studios, Nevada City, CA

Mastered by Jett Galindo at The Bakery, Los Angeles, CA

Album photography by Nina Johnson

Album design by Craig Ferroggiaro at Willamette Valley Color, Portland, OR

This project warmed the cockles of my heart from inception to completion and timely release now, in the worst planetary crisis of most of our lives when the collective mood of the world could use a little quantum jumping to a different outlook.  

The songs:

1. The Walk - classic boogie shuffle with old-school saxophone riffs and solo supporting Johnny's James Dean-like swaggering cool invitation to dance.

2. You're So Square (Baby, I Don't Care) - a rockabilly romantic ode of devotion

3. Bad Bad Whiskey - the blackest of blues; Johnny captures the existential despair of a ruined life but with an air of defiance as if to say: "I made it through the night and I'm hear to sing my song." Brilliant anguished guitar embellishments and solo. 

4. So Many Pretty Women -  a straight, fast-paced, old rock n roller about the temptations for a star devoted to his muse, his one love, and heading on home. Smokin' piano and guitar solos underline the urgency.

5. Get Back - rock n roll slightly slower and funkier with a greasy saxophone hook; more romantic adventures and misadventures on the other side of town.

6. Some Things Never Change - a gut wrenching, tear jerker 50's style ballad; the emotion in Johnny's voice will rip your heart out.  True love changes its forms of expression but always speaks with the same voice.

From the label:  NEW RELEASE! Johnny rekindles his long-time love affair with 50’s rock ’n roll with this rollicking new throwback EP! Includes six driving tracks, two original songs (penned by Johnny himself) and the ever-stellar Genuine Gentlemen Band. LET’S JUMP!!

From Johnny:  My music has always been optimistic and hopeful and Jump With Johnny is no exception. I was planning to release this collection later this year, but I realized that many of the people I care about could really use some lifting NOW more than ever, so I’m pleased to report that TODAY will be the day for lifting :)

I hope you can pick it up, spin it vigorously and remember that you are not alone. I believe that things WILL get better! Dance! 

 I plan to play some live shows to support the release after the fog clears, but for now, we will stay connected through the magic of recorded music. Until then, thank you for your love and support. I hope you like the new music. I miss you all very much. 

xoxo~

JB

To find out more about Johnny Boyd, visit his website.

* * * * * * 

"The idea is to do pre-Elvis rock 'n roll capturing the sound and spirit of that time while giving it a contemporary presentation.  This is an artistic project, we're going for art, I'm don't care if it's commercial."  I'm paraphrasing the initial concept Johnny told me for this project.  I immediately saw the possibilities for a fun and completely different, non-standard creative recording endeavor.

Apart from being a high calibre solo artist, songwriter, and bandleader, Johnny is an amazing interpreter of songs, breathing new life into the clay of tunes gone by.  He is a real singer, a singer like Frank or Tony.  There are very few real singers in the genres of pop/rock/country/blues.  For male singers we find Freddie Mercury, Meat Loaf, and Johnny Boyd.  Only one of these has incredible new music to hear right now!

To get the sound of how they recorded rock 'n roll back in the mid 1950s I called up my friend Jimmi Accardi, another talented musician, songwriter, engineer and producer, who knows more about the history of rock 'n roll than anyone I know.  He broadcast a two hour show on KVMR, the local radio station called Rock n Roll Party every Monday afternoon for over 20 years; I figured he would know how they recorded and I was right.  

Jimmi directed me to the classic New Orleans engineer, Cosimo Matassa who recorded Fats Domino, Little Richard and a host of other early rock 'n roll artists.  He gave me the low down on how Cosimo recorded, 8 tracks maximum, all recorded live in one big room; because of all the inevitable bleed, the musicians have to get the balance with each other acoustically in the room.  No one had headphones and there weren't studio speakers to monitor with, the musicians had to position themselves to hear what they needed to hear.  It was all about performance.

The micing for Jumping With Johnny was done with that aesthetic in mind, keeping it more minimal than usual.  Larry Crane was engineering at his studio Jackpot in Portland and also knew how Cosimo worked.  He set up a single large diaphram mic over the drums and another one in front of the kick not positioned too close.  He also had a great ribbon mic for a mono room sound across from the drums and piano and another stereo room pair further back.  Everyone played in the same room, the uprite bass player was in another booth, but we kept the door open; also the door isolating the guitar amp was open a crack.  Johnny sang a guide and viscerally felt out the arrangements, fine tuning and honing them as they progressed. Everyone had live contact as the music went down, a group performance captured in the moment.

Recording this was a lot of fun.  The core group of musicians and the production team had worked together for over five years, most notably on the sensational album of crooner tunes by Johnny Boyd, Someday Dreams of You.  Most of the musicians comprise Johnny's regular touring band and sax player Willie Matheis has sat in multiple times.

Jackpot Recording in Portland is a power spot for me. By that, I mean it acts a portal for what Idries Shah called the Inner Circle of Humanity. For the music, it means that forces inevitably come through, not only from the synergy of the musicians' performances and technicians' recordings, but from the conjunction and synergy of that group in this particular place, at this specific spot on the Earth.  The entire atmosphere at the point of creation gets recorded along with the audio, they are interconnected, and becomes translated as mood.  For the involved listener, it gets received as spiritual nourishment.

Here is some evidence.  In days of yore, shopkeepers would hang a shingle outside their establishment to indicate the nature of their business. This is a shingle on the building just outside Jackpot's door:

Obviously a Sufi signifier, no explanation needed.

Another power spot for me in Portland is my place of residence in the guest room at Casa Boyd located atop a hill in King's Heights overlooking the city.  The hospitality provided by Angela and Johnny rivals the Sufis, I feel like a King or a Noble Ambassador when staying there.  Four double hung windows provide a panorama view of Portland, the Williamette River, and five distant surrounding mountains.  After retiring, I'll write or read something like Crowley, Deleuze or Pynchon, or listen to music, keeping the blinds open to glance up and watch the flickering electric lights from the city illuminate the night.  The ever-changing traffic in motion, flowing like blood through the arteries of the city, reminds me that every individual in that stream thinks they are the center of the Universe, and they're right!

The view faces south and east so I leave the blinds open all night to greet the morning light.  If I am lucky, I will have observed the sun as it arose across the sky from the horizon to gain ascendency in the new day.  After leaving Mount Olympus to make our way back to Jackpot, we'll have an informal production meeting to plot strategy on the drive down.  For this album, Johnny turned me on to the artist J.D. McPherson who has a similar old school, rock 'n roll aesthetic but with a modern sound.  We discussed what we liked and didn't like about their production.

Then arriving back at Jackpot, it was like going straight from the dojo where you contemplate, pray, eat, rest and rejuvenate to the dojo where you work.  The kind of work, from the occult point of view, represented by this sign in the studio's entrance chamber:

When it came time to mix, I took it to Ancient Wave Studios, another power spot, to take advantage of their Trident TSM vintage desk.  Another album I was referencing for the sound of Jump With Johnny was  Blue and Lonesome by The Rolling Stones which had recently come out.  Unlike all  their albums since Exile On Main Street, this one had a gritty, slightly dirty, live feel.   It sounded like an older record yet with the clarity of modern production.  The sound was compact, more mono than usual, giving them an intimate sound in a small room.  This was the aesthetic I was shooting for.

After Johnny heard the first few mixes he basically thought they were too tame.  Everything was too properly in its place, the vocals were sitting a little too on top for him.  There was a classic conversation which I wished I recorded where he iterated and reiterated the idea that I should go wild and crazy with it.  "I want it to sound like it's coming through a broken piece of equipment on the verge of completely dying and shattering the fabric of time and space."  I found myself both disappointed and elated.  Disappointed, because I really liked the sound of those first mixes, I felt they captured the concept I was going for; elated because no one gives me that license to push it to the limit since I worked with Tom Waits, usually it's the opposite and I end up reeling the craziness in.

To achieve this, I pushed the TSM mixer as far as it could go, I used the summing bus on that as my stereo compressor, and didn't use anything else across the stereo bus.  I also took advantage of the Tridents mic pres to blend in parallel some overdriven stress and light distortion.  Larry recorded JB with the two microphone set-up we have found works so well on this voice consisting of a RCA 77 Ribbon and a large diaphram tube condenser, one providing classic vintage warmth, the other more clarity in the upper mids and highs.  Sonically, they gave me the old and the new to blend as I wished.

You can only go so far with planning and premeditating wildness, so to keep the chaotic x factor I mixed all the songs live.  That is, I relied very little on automation.  After getting the sounds, I might have applied some very basic automated moves in Pro Tools, but I mixed it riding and moving faders on the fly.  Some times it might take me 3 or 4 or 5 or 6 passes to get it.  Sometimes, I would do a pass I liked, keep it, then try for a better one.  I did take advantage of the fact that I could punch in sections of the mix.  If I got halfway through really well, then messed up, I could keep the beginning and go on from there.

Johnny immediately liked this new approach.  I'm very proud and happy with the way the sound came out, it has a unique quality that speaks for itself.  I consider this a legacy project.

Jett Galindo of The Bakery was brought onboard for the final stage of mastering the mixes for release.  Jett had apprenticed under the late, great Doug Sax at The Mastering Lab, one of my all time favorite mastering engineers.  Galindo skillfully added the final polish to the mixes without compromising the integrity of the sound Johnny and I had achieved.  She deftly balanced and placed all the energy, rawness and wildness of this early rock 'n roll musical experiment in the context of a contemporary release.

The timing is perfect to listen to this, dance with this and feel good despite the darkness of the moment.  Jump With Johnny will help things change.  Enjoy!

Maitreya Wolf FERTILE DARKNESS

The debut album by Maitreya Wolf is now OUT!

Available for preview and download HERE.

The music is shamanic and invocational.  Every recording session had the contemplative focus found in a sacred Temple.  The space was always cleansed and consecrated beforehand clearing the way for the descent of the music. Maitreya reaches deep into her Being to express her Truth through these songs with some assistance from a small circle of close friends.  The music will touch and resonate with anyone on the path of gnothi seauton, Self-discovery.

Hypnotic, ego-dissolving, trance-inducing, primal, delicate, passionate, pastoral, joyful are just a few descriptors that map out the wealth of atmospheric territory found in these sparse, intimate arrangements.  

Alpha and omega, I had the honor and pleasure of engineering this production from beginning to end.  One story gives an example of the sanctuary space found on this album.  I was digging around behind the console in one studio wiring something up when I heard a crash behind me.  I had accidentally knocked over a tall, delicate, wood totem that looked liked it had been hand carved in the South Seas.  It split in half.  I took the two pieces outside to avoid further damage.  A few minutes later as I was still furtively running about getting the session up, I noticed Maitreya doing healing passes over the damaged statue praying for its living spirit.  All the music on Fertile Darkness expresses different forms of that aesthetic, that healing awareness. 

Here is what Maitreya wrote to describe the music:

There is an initiation woven into the fibers of every persons life.  We may or may not recognize it when it comes to shake our world to its foundations, but it always comes.  Life demands of us our greatest beauty, strength, heart and soul, and will stop at nothing to forge us into the greatest possible expression of our souls unique being.  I was drawn into my initiation unexpectedly and with great force and have dedicated my whole being to walking that path well ever since.  These songs are the fruits of that journey.  I have harvested the medicine from my time in the fertile darkness of my own being and I offer it to you now as a gift and a blessing for your journey of Life.

Beauty feeds the soul.  May you be well nourished on your singular odyssey.

ENJOY!!!

1965 Dylan Lyrics Po Corona Pandemic

Po is a word that precedes and signals a provocation.  A provocation is an idea which moves thinking forward to a new place from where new ideas or solutions may be found.  The term was created by Edward De Bono as part of a lateral thinking technique to suggest forward movement, that is, making a statement and seeing where it leads.  It is an extraction from words such as hypothesis, suppose, possible, and poetry al of which indicate forward movement and contain the syllable "po."  Po can be taken to mean Provoking Operation. - Wikipedia, slightly modified.

The push to open the US economy against the advice of health experts and before adequate testing is in place to determine who is sick and who is not, seems another example of the schizophrenic side of Capitalism.  The probability seems high that another surge in covid 19 illness would further cripple the economy, not to mention kill off consumers.  I prefer this model as an explanation, the schizo proclivity of Capitalism, to the darker one that population control, i.e intentionally allowing people to get killed, motivates the rush to open the economy.

I was inspired by a Facebook game to listen to Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited while driving into town to pick up some Iris cuttings for our garden.  It struck me that some of the lyrics, when isolated, written circa 1965, resonate with current times.  Of course, many of his poetic lyrics sound timeless, but I found fresh significance particular to this time  in some of the imagery.

For instance, from Tombstone Blues - the song's title alone reflects the current atmosphere of death:

The ghost of Belle Starr she hands down her wits
To Jezebel the nun who violently knits
A bald wig for Jack the Ripper who sits
At the head of the Chamber of Commerce.

Belle Starr was a 19th Century American outlaw.  Her name also alludes to a Tarot card image, the woman pouring forth celestial sustenance on the Star card.  Dylan studied the Tarot at some point, probably somewhere between Rimbaud, Kerouac, & Ginsberg, and Jesus Christ and The Talmud.

Jezebel the nun refers to the wife of the Biblical ruler of North Israel instrumental in steering her kingdom away from Judaism.  She wasn't a nun, the first nuns appeared in the middle ages, however nun suggests nihilism.

The third and fourth lines of this stanza indicate Trump and Capitalism.  Trump's overly aggressive, combative inclination to attack anything that challenges, criticizes or opposes him resonates with Jack the Ripper.  Advocating to open the economy at the expense of people's health and lives also recalls Mr. Ripper's aesthetic.  Like Capitalism, Trump displays schizophrenic reactions, he can and does abruptly reverse or change course depending upon his mood and contingencies.  He's not Jack the Ripper all the time, but that character comes through enough to make him appear extremely, existentially dangerous when large amounts of human life sit in the balance.

Then we go to the chorus:

"Mama's in the factory she ain't got no shoes" - Health-care workers in the front line lacking sufficient Personal Protective Equipment.  Hopefully that's changing, yet we hear talk of a possible second wave, more likely sooner rather than later if social distancing lets up too soon, and we could be scrambling for more PPE again.

"Daddy's in the alley, he's looking for food." - More people than ever are lining up at food banks, most for the first time in their life.

" I'm in the kitchen with the tombstone blues." - In esoteric, or occult fashion this line actually signals the redemptive power of the song.

Dylan has received criticism over the years about being excessively cyncical.  In my view, he states and confronts problems, but then always, often mysteriously and cryptically, points to a solution.  Whether this comes from "Bob Dylan" or the Intelligence invoked into the song, I do not know, it seems to always appear, just not as obvious as the problem.

"I" - the source of active redemptive force, the presence of that kind of attention, love under will,
"am in the kitchen," - the place where you make food.  In certain esoteric communities, the kitchen is known as the heart of the community.  In this way, kitchen connects with Belle Starr.
"with the tombstone blues.  The blues inevitably feels redemptive to me, even blues chord progressions and rhythm without lyrics - the SOUND of the blues always lifts me up when it's right.  That's why you sing the blues, to change the mood of the current situation, to reterritorialize tragedy into something that feels better, something that can even feel good.

The other song that caught my attention on the drive was Highway 61 Revisited.  Highway 61 is kind of legendary for what has happened along it:  Bessie Smith was murdered on Highway 61, Elvis Presley lived and died very near there, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated right by it,  Bob Dylan was born close to Highway 61 and grew up near a different part of it.  In the song, it sounds like a place for the con games of Religion and Capitalism that inevitably lead to war.  We find an obvious redemptive stanza to the situation.

"Now the rovin' gambler he was very bored
He was tryin' to create the next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaed in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it could be very easily done
we'll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61"

Bleaching, cleaning, out in the sun suggests a solution, but the most obvious occult counterforce to the challenges or tragedy on Highway 61 - which can also be considered as Chapel Perilous or the Bardo, comes in the stanza before:

"Now the fifth daughter on the twelfth night
Told the first father that things weren't right
My complexion she said is much too white
He said come her and step into the light he says hmmm you're right
Let me tell the second mother this has been done
But the second mother was with the seventh son
And they were both out on Highway 61."

The second mother expresses as Babalon (also the second He in Yod He Vau He) in Thelemic terminology, the human manifestation of the archetype of the first mother. 7 = Venus.  This line could represent the ON formula, the combining of male and female energies to produce some kind of love under will.

The are other lines on the album, even whole songs such as Like A Rolling Stone, or maybe ALL of them it seems now that I think of it, that easily fit the context of the moment.  It makes me wonder about music and its ability to jump over time - be just as relevant in multiple, different moments of time.