Thro evening shades I haste away
To close the Labours of my Day
William Blake, The Traveller Hasteth in the Evening (1793).1

My childhood bends beside me. Too far for me to lay a hand there once or lightly... Secrets, silent, stony sit in the dark palaces of both our hearts: secrets weary of their tyranny: tyrants, willing to be dethroned.
James Joyce, Ulysses

I had a tenacious faith in myself, a Messiah as yet without a message who would one-day assemble a unique identity out of this defective jigsaw.
‘Blake’, in J G Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company

t/w death: a caveat on delays

Rise up nimbly and go on your strange journey to the ocean of meanings. Leave, and don't look away from the sun as you go.
Rumi, Mathnawi

This post concerns an impending death; my own. My recent diagnosis (Mar 4ᵗʰ) is both complicated, but also typical of a stage four lung cancer (metastatic cancer), if I understand it right, with the cancer identifying itself only weeks ago, and further growths identified since then: I have tumours in the legs, lymph nodes and adrenal glands; a 4.5 cm tumour on the left lung is crowding out the nearby aorta; it has sprouted a smaller (11 mm) tumour on the right lung too; and colonies have set up camp in the cerebellum. A round of CT (Computed Tomography), MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), X-Ray, EBUS (Endobronchial Ultrasound), and PET (Positron Emission Tomography) scan results is still being analysed. New facts emerge. I’m only just weeks into things and counting.

The core of the cancer—the in situ neoplasm: lodged lungwards near the heart—will have been lurking a while, silently sliming me up from within—every bit as game as myself, to be fair. With so many interactions possible between affected organs, anything might happen. That’s the picture I get. I may be with you for a long time yet, or I may not.

Someone with this prognosis is already a little less than human by today’s reckoning, because tucked back into time-on-loan, dashed into the ocean of ‘getting on with it’ and ‘bearing up’. Of course, we are all now ‘tucked back into time’ by virtue of being born at all (or so everyone seems convinced since the Enlightenment, at least). But in a cancer diagnosis, the limitation is seen as constitutive: to your peers, you are now increasingly seen to be that limit. If you don’t believe me, you may be shocked by the insistence with which people raise the issue of the effectiveness of your treatment and its deadlines.

The thing I want to get at first is how quickly I accepted, and even welcomed, the judgment, and looked straight to the end. In my own way, I felt blessed. My first thought was of Blake’s last moments, according to George Richmond, one of his young followers, ‘the Ancients‘: “He said He was going to that Country he had all his life wished to see & expressed himself Happy hoping for Salvation through Jesus Christ… He burst out in singing of the things he Saw in Heaven.”2

I guess you have just been made nervous by the traditional, sweaty, religiose-sounding talk of salvation “through Jesus Christ”, and its expectation of a resurrection “in the body”, which sounds at first glance as corny as any magician’s assistant hopping lightly from a wardrobe, having just been sawn in half. Bear with me.

I won’t dwell on the traditional funeral service talk of how “after my skin worms destroy this body, yet in my flesh I shall see God.” [Job 19:25-26] But let us note that, for Blake, this ‘body’—yours and mine alike—is the one body of Christ, Blake’s Lord God: “imagination or the Divine Body in Every Man.” I have written at length about this aspect of Blake’s thought, especially as it relates to theodicy and redemption in the Book of Job, and of the consequent liberatory, polysemic chaos Blake reaps for his understanding in engaging with the Canaanite Job, from ‘the land of Uz’. All talk of resurrection in what follows—a resurrection from which I fully expect to benefit—should be read in this light as a drop of temporarily, illusorily autonomous mind rejoining the cosmic ocean, “the mind lake”, and not merely bouncing back up on the table again.

The closest I’ve come yet to a human feeling for the end, as opposed to a marker projected further down the timeline, was from a consultant commenting that “if deterioration seems rapid to you, you’ve probably not long to go”; but if it seems slow, then—as Tweedle Dum or Dee might have said—”contrariwise: that’s Glory!!” Anyway, this week has been all about non-small cell carcinomas and their friends and emissaries.

As to how rapid my degeneration will be, you may decide from what follows, and get roughly as good an idea as I. A consultant just described a plausible course of chemotherapy, lasting around two years, which might be appropriate for my treatment, so that if I were to start soon and stay the course—and all went well—I’ll be around in two years from now. This was not a prediction, yet felt like a soothing expansion of an actuality that seemed wholly constraining just moments before. For an instant, I relaxed. That’s more or less how I’ve been taking in diagnostic information: fitfully, impressionistically.

Having spent years contemplating death on and off as the subject of several rounds of brain surgery, a stent-assisted coiling of an subarachnoid aneurysm (2005), bladder cancer (2014), a ranting philosopher, a lover of Blake’s most earthly of heavenly delights,3 and even a as a death doula trained with the Living Well, Dying Well Foundation, I’m not inclined to stop now, on its doorstep, but will hopefully see this through and talk about the experience as it happens, as best I can. The caveat is that I don’t want to catch friends tapping their watches, wondering when I will get on with the finalé for their benefit. If that prospect seems likely to frustrate you—forgive me. Things may drag on.

momentary diversions

It’s been a while since I posted on Substack (most recently, on David Bowie and the Droog Superior: Violence and the Dame—a theme as tightly coupled to my origins as a personality as this post hopefully will be about my uncoupling from the same), the time between being not so much busy as commandeered.

my life in a comic
The way they did the Bible
All the bubbles and actions
Little details in color

First a horseback bomber
(we’ll discover a star)
Then a small thin chance
Like seeing Jesus on Dateline
(like the stars in your eyes)

Let’s face the music and dance
Don’t ever say I’m ready, I’m ready, I’m ready
David Bowie, New Killer Star

It started with a twist: a stitch, a burst of short-windedness, and some tight leg muscles while taking our dogs (Maggie & Stan) daily through Hackney to Abney Park Cemetery, Hackney Marshes and beyond, just three months ago.

Note that during this recent period, I felt pain nowhere but in my joints and muscles. This was unpleasant, of course, but gave no hint of anything seriously awry. The hard blows landed only in recent weeks, in quick succession, not always involving more pain. The leg pains grew until I had to take myself to the doctor and stop the dog’s walks. At an age in life when arthritis often hovers, I sought help.

I already owe my life to the NHS several times over, as you will hear. But the topic now is not sickness and cancer as such, but of starting suddenly to peek spontaneously, as a result of the news, somehow, above those “dark palaces of our hearts,” (James Joyce, Ulysses) where previously we maybe sought to assemble Gillian Rose’s ‘defective jigsaw’ of our person to try to emerge whole above them—an unlikely coherence in the face of recalcitrant people and things—shuffling the palace furniture about, coming to terms with the new, trying to put down, resolve and evaporate old mysteries and find peace among the noise of death-in-life: “the only paradises cannot be those that are lost, but those that are unlocked as a result of coercion, reluctance, cajolery and humiliation” (Rose).4

The theme, then, is of how a lifetime of entangled regrets, trauma and abuse as a result of my family history, mutating, but never resolving, began to evaporate: that, plus the Buddhist Kati crystal tube, the Man of Light in Iranian Sufism (whether discussed specifically or not), altered states, ecstacy, Blake’s resurrection, and my own. How can biological metastasis induce Christian metanoia?5

Rose emphasised the necessity of this restless dialectic of framing the self, then navigating its implied challenge. More sympathetic to the flavour of Joyce’s epiphanies (and Joyce certainly being more in tune with Blake), I sought the transcendence of that struggle instead. The thing is, when the blows landed, I found myself immediately reconciled to the bottom-line outcome, death itself (if not all its ramifications, especially for my loved ones). As I emphasise throughout what follows, two worlds part ways spectacularly the moment anyone mentions the dreaded prognosis, asks me how I feel, or comments on my stoicism

This shift of gear is the issue. But as the medical verdict was handed down, was I in any better position to hear it than on the day I retired, five years ago, started this blog, and set off on the long voyage into the ‘evening’? Did the talk here of William Blake and prophecy, of Christ, vision, the Ranters, Surrealism, and Christian communism prepare the Traveller at all? Absolutely, yes I said yes It did Yes.

But I can’t show as much without setting this richness against the wearying medical processing, and the caring, noisome interpolation of others (‘how are you feeling?’). It is their comingled arising which best illustrates how two worlds, this and the next, are (not separating, but always actually) separated to regard each other: now and eternity.

After a lifetime of endless hard-scrabble (they say), is there time for peace? Can you close out your world of concerns and rise to meet the other in time (out of time?) Remarkably, more than I dared hope.

So, my claim is that my attempt to capture the absurdity of the news and its sense of closure it gave me must be set against a background of clattering walking sticks, family agendas, and missed appointments. Bear with me as I tour the hospital corridors and their visitors.

time boom x de devil dead!

God slew Satan and closed down hell / God slew the Russian and break this spell.
I am the Upsetter, still around. Lee Perry

My ship is sailing
Sri Krishna Prem6

At first, I spent weeks trying to get the local surgery to take my leg pains at all seriously. They encouraged me to rest. The statins prescribed for my blood pressure were stopped: “give it a month: we’ll see what happens.” I took co-codamol (paracetamol and codeine) for pain relief and got chronic constipation.

I also took to twisting medieval-looking steel massage rods and harrows into the muscles of my legs to soothe them at night, but the pain continued, and I lost sleep and weight. A round of acupuncture gave almost a day of blessed relief; £38 for half an hour’s pin-work on Lower Clapton Road. When my wife led me down to Homerton A&E one Saturday afternoon, an intern concluded that pain alone did not warrant further investigation: we could go home.

No one knows at this point, but the pain is caused by a metastasised tumour, parking itself in the left leg, pressing down on the adjacent bone, threatening to fracture it. The fracturing has yet to happen, and probably will not do so now we know what it’s up to, but the tumour itself drives on.7 Referred pains at this time shuttle all night between left and right legs, from knee to hip—perhaps there is something wrong with my spine, someone cheerfully offers.

I’ve been in remission from bladder cancer anyway for a decade now, monitored annually by endoscopy (they insert a live camera into the penis and scout around for deadly crumbs and sores: you watch all this happening on the handy trolley camera monitor as it takes place),8 but no one thinks to investigate a possible connection, what with the hip and bladder being neighbours. It turns out they are right: the bladder is not to blame. It is something else. Coincidentally, my next planned bladder scan is only a few weeks away now, likely headed for postponement.

I contacted the surgery once more to request a face-to-face meeting and, a few days later, finally received an invite for an on-site appointment at two-thirty in the afternoon. The surgery normally takes about ten minutes’ walk, so I get my crutches and set off with time to spare. Upon arrival, I register with the admissions system at the gate, submit my date of birth and postcode, and receive instant confirmation: I have a two-thirty appointment as advertised, and can proceed to wait.

As I’d manfully put in a bit of a sprint with the crutches, in my enthusiasm at the thought of being seen, I managed to arrive fifteen minutes early, so It is around two-fifteen now. I sit on one of the plastic chairs found in any such waiting room, putting only small pressure on my back, rocking gently while reading a book. Two-thirty arrives: two-forty. But I‘m not called. It is only a ten-minute wait, and there really is a lot of need around here. Soon it is ten minutes to three, then three o’clock. I am tired.

I approach the reception area again, explaining that, as I’m partially deaf, even though wearing my hearing aid, I often miss being called over the waiting-room tannoy. Could they check? They do so, returning to explain that the texted invitation from the surgery’s appointment system for an appointment at the surgery at two-thirty does not mean having actually to attend surgery. No—for my convenience, they will call me by phone.

I point out that it’s now just gone three pm, and I obviously have received no call. I am told that the allotted time is only ‘indicative’, as the doctors cannot always make time precisely, because, of course, they are so busy. I am free to go home and await the call. Someone did call. I think possibly this was the point at which a scan was finally arranged, which is what I wanted.

I tell you this, not to bemoan bureaucracy again, but to set the scene for comparing two worlds. The point about any problems with the NHS is not that they are so terrible, but that they are problems of this world we are taught to see as the inevitable price of continuing under late capitalism (or however you like to characterise Urizen’s dens: Egypt, Babylon, and the rest, where Urizen is a key figure in Blake’s mthology of control). This becomes clearer each day as time passes in this mode. The split between outer and inner worlds is a peeling apart that can only properly be experienced piecemeal, perhaps necessarily a little wearisomely. I’ll carry on telling the tale of how the juggernaut of mortal news let loose through such tiny rips, mishearings, fumblings, excuses and the like. The point is not to run down the NHS but to mind the gap between what is happening clinically and how it rebounds within.

In one world, there are appointments: people ask you how you are, where it hurts, how you feel, and whether you would like tea. Have you taken any painkillers or coagulants today? Laxatives? Are you being collected? Did you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

At the same time, in the new world blowing through, the thoughts and feelings of many years may reassemble and even begin to settle down at last. It is this I want to reflect on, if I can. But I need to establish the space between worlds, even as they overlap endlessly in discussion with friends and loved ones, medical staff, and the curious… like M-branes colliding. There is parallax at play, new conjurations of feeling, and uprisings of old states of the self looking for recognition and absolution.

At last, an appointment has now been made at the Homerton Hospital for an initial CT scan to investigate possible fracturing of the femur at the most painful area of my leg. In the radiation department, I’m kitted out with a gown with some dramatic blood stains spilt down the front, and left to try it on. A young and friendly nurse helps me clamber onto the table for the scan. Once done, I‘m unbundled back into the same attached cubicle to dress. There are no staff around now that I can see, but another, fitter, patient sees my plight and picks up the basket of my clothes left on the floor in the corridor and passes it to me. I dress and find my way out of the radiology department, out of the Homerton, onto the night bus.

A PET scan is organised a few days later, at St Barts Hospital, in the shadow of St Paul’s. The body is flooded with a tracer radioactive fluid, after which you are locked into a lead-lined box for three-quarters of an hour to allow it to bake in. The scanner then detects where the tracer has been absorbed by cell growth anywhere in the body it is directed, producing reams of flowing light captured to film, copies of which—scans of my own body—are used throughout this post.

bodies of light

The Atoms of Democritus
And Newtons Particles of light
Are sands upon the Red Sea shore
Where Israel’s tents do shine so bright
William Blake, ‘Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau’9

The moment I saw the very first scan the doctors showed me (bottom right, above: an MRI, rather than PET, as it happens)—on a small monitor wheeled into my cubicle at the Homerton—seemed to say everything at once. As I turned my head to look at the image of my brain on the monitor, I glimpsed also the tattoo on my left arm suddenly aligned with it (bottom left)—a tattoo of a bhikkhu meditating in flames, inked twenty years earlier, with the bhikkhu meditating as descibed in the Buddha’s Adittapariyaya Sutta (Fire Sermon)—such that the tattoo of the bhikkhu and the scan of the brain, aligned properly. One presaged the other by years, holding out its hand to the other. They reflected each other so neatly, with the tumour in the cerebellum showing up as the red-orange fire bursting through from within, which the bhikkhu sits through.

The wrinkled surface of the cerebral cortex in the scan echoed the Bhavachakra—the wheel of Saṃsāra, of cyclical existence (“Saṃsāra… is a Sanskrit word that means ‘wandering’ as well as ‘world’, wherein the term connotes ‘cyclic change’ or, less formally, ‘running around in circles’)10—against which the bhikkhu rests in the tattoo. Here is an image, not only of that empty time turning that we have talked of, of cyclical return and, dare I say it, reincarnation (though in this formulation, reincarnation is mere repetition, as in the ‘natural’ repetition of pagan society). In the original Fire Sermon, the argument is that the bhikkhu must free themself from the grasping tyranny of the senses. We, on the other hand, will be moving in the other direction. In any case, this combined image almost made me fall out of bed.

In much of what follows, I will mention coincidences, proto-visions, hints and signs of many things, hoping readers will put them together for themselves, quite apart from my prompting. But for the avoidance of doubt, I want to say openly now that what I found in all this is what Jeffrey Kripal has called ‘the flip’: “his term for the moment—through mystical or near-death experience…—when one decides that not only is all matter imbued with mind, but the idea that we are individual people is just an illusion: the entire universe itself comprises a single vast mind, through which our own apparently private consciousnesses are tiny cross-sections.”11 It is these cross-sections that have been crowding around me since C-day, piling up in front of me while calling out to one another unceasingly.

As such symbols echoed and returned in the days to come, they looked less like images of a pointless recycling, and more like promises of overcoming it, not just the a snake-tail swallowing and recycling of the Ouroboros reboot and Ragnarok (of which, more to come), and Nietzsche’s Eternal Return

On seeing further scans, I recognised, eg., my rib cage as something indeed very much like the frame of Israel’s tents (above, top left), beaming on the shore of the infinite (Blake), but also, in the twisting images of the torso, I am struck by the sprawling energies at play, unleashed by disease. No longer is there the assumed underlying durable person, sealed away from the totality, cybernetically establishing their personal border by fending off and repurposing the chaos, sickness and disorder without. Instead, raw energies start to coalesce, turning Urizenic, mechanical rigidity into flashes, streaks and pulses of contending light.

When looking at the flowing lights of the scans, I am not seeing the regular mechanics/dynamics of fluid flow and the like. It is not the competing power of the different forces involved, sloshing against one another, that impresses. That would represent a reasonable romantic regard for the power of things we don’t fully understand, and which we dimly suspect may outbid us in the end.

What I find more compelling in the forms on show are the signs of a deeper, primordial language of the cosmos, God’s being and the unconstrained underpinning of all those other things, the syntax of God’s mind and its reality of eternal esemplatic (form-giving, creative) inflation. To see the churning faces of the sea of light is to see the surface of the esemplasm that is all being, and which calls us from its depths.

These dimly perceived logics, the raw shapes of the divine body of the imagination, are the subject of the dissident Surrealist, Roger Caillois’ 1970 study of stones, L’écriture des pierres.12

I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnetism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.
Roger Caillois

I want friends to see that, as they enquire after my health as it relates to cells, seizures and toxins—and ‘anxiety’—they recall fears I hope to leave behind as fast as I can. Family want reconciliation and reassurance to steady their own wobbly ships, while you need to let go now of such wrappings.

But I don’t want to jump the gun, and the point is that the distinction, at first, only emerges and appears fitfully, blowing across the horizon. (“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound” John 3:08.) So let’s proceed slowly.

Wherever we find the flip between worlds, wherever we first pin it down, for me it was at around this point, a moment at which I knew for sure: “Time boom x De devil dead!” It is the moment when Alice, having fallen into one side of the mirror, plunges out into vistas on the other. Be aware that (as in Alice’s world), what follows will sometimes seem anachronistic, contrived, purple and awry when seen from the other perspective. But it is perfectly firm.

it’s probably what you already guessed. but it wasn’t

Days later, I received a call from the surgery. They’d like to discuss the scan results. Could I pop in… within the hour, perhaps? We are all suddenly alert and prompt. Time itself tightens. My wife comes with me, and soon we’re sat by the young doctor, who pulls out a sheaf of notes. “We’ve received the scan report, and I’m afraid it is what you probably already guessed.” It’s been several months, and I’d guessed nothing as yet. It seems that what they found in the first instance was a “left hilar mass highly suspicious for primary lung bronchogenic malignancy… encasing and attenuating the main pulmonary artery and upper and lower lobe bronchi.” That. Cancer. If you want to isolate the mic-drop moment, there it goes.

Shortly after this, I was moved to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) at Homerton and the first phase of treatment started with new prescriptions to deal with various pa ins and to rein in any swelling of the cerebellum.

Only days after further tests have been collated and consulting conferences held, I‘m invited to Bart’s Hospital to meet the oncologist who will direct the next steps. All is confirmed about the spread of the tumour to the brain. The question is, has the tumour already spread too widely for me to benefit from whole brain radiotherapy? They will take a view.

Some days later, I am released back to my home, and an appointment is made with an oncologist at St Barts to summarise what has been learned to date and to start mapping out the beginning of treatment.

After an hour-long early morning meeting, I’m nervous but good to go. I find another plastic chair to park in; they tell me it will be at least two hours before there will be transport to get me home. After two and a half hours, maybe three, of trying to get to grips with Mrs Dalloway, a highly un-Bloomsbury-like driver manifests suddenly from out of the Bart’s car park and calls my name, along with that of another patient. Once in the car, he tells us we must detour East to pick up a third soul at Royal London, who also needs returning to Hackney.

At the Royal London, the driver pulls up sharply in front of the hospital entrance and dashes off to find his new charge. He also locks his two existing fares in the back of the car. The moment he’s gone, his car alarm erupts at full volume. We are locked in. Neither of us can reach the front of the car, nor do we know how to turn off the alarm.

I’m having a panic attack, not knowing how to get safe as the alarm screeches. The alarm stops; then starts again. It turns through three cycles before I can haul my legs and crutches by hand over and into the front seats, and, lying face down in the footwell, I manage to push open the driver’s door and flop onto the pavement.

Not paying enough attention to the instructions for my appointment, it’s now been eight hours since I’ve eaten (a bowl of porridge). I’d also forgotten to bring my medications as instructed and am aching all over. I’d been handed a terminal diagnosis (“I’m afraid no currently available curative procedures are appropriate”) and was still shaken by the alarm when I finally arrived home: shaken, yes, but oddly elated.

For all that, what I want to concentrate on is the gap between living and dying, persisting and passing. Perhaps I’ve already made too much of it, lending legitimacy to our fear of the modern ‘real’, turning it into a necessity to be ground through to the bitter end: “getting real”. But it is never that, which is always the point of Blake, right: did we forget? He is always available: the body of Christ, the esemplastic imagination. It just turns out that the prospect of death can open us up directly to this, through a “globule of man’s blood’” or many such globules together: scarlet rain.

For every Space larger than a red Globule of Mans blood.
Is visionary: and is created by the Hammer of Los
And every Space smaller than a Globule of Mans blood. opens
Into Eternity of which this vegetable Earth is but a shadow:
The red Globule is the unwearied Sun by Los created
To measure Time and Space to mortal Men. every morning.
William Blake, Milton13

According to psychologist Janis Chen, recent improvements and fine-tuning of targeted cancer therapy are conspiring to drag out the awful grinding struggle to exist indefinitely, post-diagnosis, creating a new breed of cancer sufferer, the ‘chronically terminal’. Oh, brave new world, that has such things as us in it!:

“In the UK, barely a decade ago, a stage four lung cancer diagnosis was a grim cliff edge… long-term survival remained in the single figures. Today, the momentum of clinical progress… has levelled that precipice into a vast, uncharted plateau... As a psychologist, I view this not just as a medical victory but as a profound existential shift: we have replaced the suddenness of the cliff with the tenuous permanence of the high ridge. Such a progression has inadvertently birthed a new demographic: the ‘chronically terminal’. We occupy an interstitial space.. still burdened with the responsibility of being within the world.“14

“Burdened with the responsibility of being in the world’: take that, loser. But we are not cursed this way; we are ‘Born to Go’, ready for grace, and we need to know how that feels. That’s where Blake comes in.

And if that isn’t true, if all that is on offer is the machinic grind, how is it that today, of all days, I met an angel? That’s not something that happens, is it? Not ever. Not even becoming a ranting Christian aspiring prophet of considerable conviction could lead me to imagine the possibility of meeting an angel. But today, I did.

I‘d spent the morning in St Bart’s Basement Nuclear Medicine Centre, having more hot radioactive tracer poured in so they could test my kidney functions to see if I‘m fit enough for chemo down the line. Once again, I was warned not to sit near anyone on the bus on my way home. Utterly exhausted and aching all over, I set off. But after averaging less than one and a half hours of sleep a night this week, I probably wasn’t up for the long voyage. The bus stops I visited all seemed out of service, as I clanked from one to the next with my new walking stick rattling away.

It started to lightly drizzle out there, and I slipped over in the road by St Paul’s while trying to cross at the lights. Eventually, I caught a bus, but then, halfway home, the hospital called to pull me back in for a crucial vitamin B12 jab I’d forgotten, and I got off just before Hackney Rd to return, heading back west. Then, they called again to say I could perhaps leave it until Monday to return if that was easier. Once again, I turned about. A scooter, taking a corner too hastily, tipped me back through the doors of the store I was passing, onto the floor, just here.

It is safe to say that by the time I was back on my feet, I felt pretty sorry for myself. But then, just as I’ve passed where I worked near Hoxton Square a decade ago, someone shook me from behind. I must have seemed a sad sight when I turned toward him: teary and unshaven, tired and sorrowful.

The handsome young black man I saw beaming before me when I turned said, “Hey! you used to help me out all the time!!” Shamefully, confused, I answered, “I’m sorry, but I can’t even help myself today: I’m so fsckd.” To which he answered, “Nooooooo! Noo! No! Not that!!.. I just wanted to say I haven’t seen you for years, and you were always helping me back then! I‘ve missed you!” He beamed at me again. I lowered my head modestly. And then I lifted it again. And he was gone. Others passed by. I walked to the next stop.

Like Cleopas and friends meeting the resurrected Christ on the road to Emmaus,15 without recognising him for hours, it took the same time for recognition to dawn that evening as I was telling my friend, Tim, what happened. I suddenly saw an angel look in on me and smile. I did not know him at all. I met an angel. He put his hand on me this afternoon. It was as simple and direct as that, and if it doesn’t make sense, it’s for the same reason that Cleopas et al. struggled to make sense of their own absolutely indubitable experience.

At the heart of so much sudden, powerful vision was the quickening evaporation of trauma going on in the background to medical developments, trauma rooted in infancy, attached firmly ever since, dragging it everywhere behind me.

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my big day out and what happened next

At the age of five, my family lived in King’s Lynn. My father drove a lorry for local transport firms—usually setting out from the docks there, a legacy of King’s Lynn having been part of the late medieval Hanseatic League, and thereby still a great distribution centre for goods shipping in from over the Channel.16 On this special day, greatly anticipated, my mother sent me packing with my dad for my first big day out on the lorry! This was an unprecedented treat for me, long promised.

We spent the day together in the cab, my father singing in his beautiful voice to the country hits of the day (he sang and yodelled magnificently in many country bands over the years). My favourite song from his repertoire ever since was Coventry’s Frank Ifield singing I Remember You, which I made my dad sing again and again that day. How did I know what came next?

When my life is through
And the angels ask me to recall
The thrill of it all
Then I will tell them I remember you

I can still see the inside of the cab. At one point, 62 years ago, I took my dad’s handkerchief and held it out of the cab window, feeling it flutter as the wind snatched at it, until it finally slipped down the road, disappearing forever in the rear-view mirror. My father was annoyed, but it passed, and we carried on singing.

What is remarkable is that these cab scenes are all I remember of the day, given what greeted us when we got home: my mother had eloped, taking brother, Phil, and the teenage lodger with her. It seems she had become pregnant by my father’s teenage cousin, Johnny Richardson, who’d been staying with us. He was sixteen or seventeen, a thief and a rent boy, and had a brutal childhood growing up in Seaham.

In her memoirs, addressed directly to me, my mother does not explain her attraction, only that she was bored with marital sex (“We were still on the twice-a-month routine”), and excited by the alternative (“It was only a matter of days before I became infatuated with little John. What he didn’t know about sex wasn’t worth knowing. I didn’t seduce him!”) Her frankness in these memoires to me is brave and quite amazing.

I have no recollection at all of the scene that greeted us at home when we returned. My only memory of the day, in summary, consists of a single life-long earworm of Ifield’s lyric, “I remember youuuu…” drawn out forever, while cutting back everything around it down to the bone. How can it be? Freud spoke of the ‘screen memories’ children have of innocent events, but which exist only to protect us from unbearable thoughts right next door, which we cannot face.17

I can’t tell you exactly how, but this day was certainly the foundation of much of what I did, said and felt for the rest of my life. Edith’s memoirs wryly comment, “The day I left has left an indelible mark on Andrew’s life—but that’s another story.” It is not a story she has chosen to tell. Instead, we had another story.

The only information I’ve ever been given about the scenes on the other side of my “remember youuu” loop-memory is my mother later telling me that, on seeing she’d gone, I announced to the world, “Well, good riddance to bad rubbish!”

How likely is it that a child would understand such an expression, let alone use it of their mother? And as she wasn’t there herself, this could only have been reported to her by my father, the only witness, who passes off his anger onto me instead, and for which my mother, while abandoning me, makes me responsible. I was Framed. Eventually, my father had me sent on to join Edith, John, Philip and (soon) Helen in Coventry. You’ve probably guessed it didn’t turn out well.

I won’t tell the details, spanning another decade and a half, but I’ll summarise it as a time in which John Richardson bullied and beat us. He raped, whipped, punched, humiliated and smashed other people and us too in endless permutations. He knocked out my front teeth by slamming my face repeatedly into the kitchen door one night as I tried to stop him from assaulting my mother (again). Mostly, he beat and humiliated my mother. He was a thief and ran a small, inept gang of other thieves.

He preyed on people wherever they existed to be preyed upon, and thought he could get away with it. He was not a clever man, but a wretch. I knew I was ’the better man’ from day one: though it didn’t pay to let him know that. Only recently, my mother confided that she suspected he may have been involved in the death of a young Czech woman in Coventry in the ‘60s, whose body was found the morning after he came home one night, seeming ‘very disturbed’. I could find no trace of such a murder anywhere in the press when she told me. She still speaks of him continually, given a suitable gap in the conversation.

After a decade of this, my mother obtained a court injunction against him, after which which he broke into the family’s refuge one evening when she was out, having left Philip to look after Helen and Jonathan, so she could have a rare evening with friends. John broke into the family’s safe house, holding Philip with a knife to his throat, telling him he would rape and murder his mother in front of him the moment she returned, and then kill the other children, too, and then him. In the end, he merely assaulted everyone and bolted.

The next afternoon, he abducted his Helen from her school gates and led the police on a weeks-long nationwide hunt to recover her: he “could not bear to see the glitter go out of her eyes at the prospect of living without him.” They were eventually found in a dilapidated caravan on the North East coast, where Helen had been locked in a divan for hours on end to keep her out of sight. I had just left home at this point, to join the Royal Navy.

Some years later, John would elope with one of Helen’s Coventry school friends, Sandra, have a daughter with her, and then, when that child was old enough, abduct her too and begin yet another police search, as he used his children to punish partners he otherwise could not control, as such powerfully toxic, risible men do. His ‘heartbreak’ made the news.

From the traditional point of view—quite correctly—the victims here are my mother and siblings together, and in our family history, the tale is one of his violence, browbeating and intimidation, and (unforgivable to her) his unwavering faithlessness in all things, not least towards her, physically and emotionally, with anyone willing and able, and how we suffered as a result, and how she fought like the tyger always to protect us.

While this is true, the family also ‘naturally’ broke down along different, divergent axes, forming complex alliances (‘multi-polar trauma bonding’), overlapping with the main narrative and just as likely to capsize and confuse it at points. Edith and Phil formed an unbreakable relationship in which she was the primary victim of the monster, the battered wife, but also the great other refuge for Philip and the children, under whom he sheltered for a lifetime.

Helen was moulded against all odds as a ‘daddy’s girl’ (don’t these men always). She clung to John as the one who could best defend her against himself, and she could rouse him to act against us instead of her if it helped shift his unwelcome attention away. Edith often boasts that she “never resorted to violence against the children”… but I know otherwise. Hundreds of events I recall are assigned to oblivion. And anyway, none of it would have happened if she hadn’t hauled off from King’s Lynn with John to begin with. Joanathan and I formed a solid bond that lasted. I was big brother, surrogate dad to my favourite toddler/comrade-in-arms, until we were both men and beyond. I believe I taught him to read when his school did not.

These multipolar relationships hide many things, but not least of all, at times, our own complicity in the trauma and the consequent guilt and resentments. The damage done commutes and lingers. Philip once drunkenly told me at length about how the day I left home was “the happiest day of his life”, which, given who he was sharing that home with [John], is quite an achievement. His first wife, on our first meeting, calmly informed me that I was “one of the most evil people who ever lived.” No details were forthcoming. I’ve spent a lifetime wondering what this was about and what I must have hidden from myself in the recesses of these years. However, if I mention this, I am a liar. We all love each other. I should try harder. “Philip loves you. Don’t lie.”

In fact, the very day I left home, I was abandoned again. Having packed the kit I needed for my trip to Torpoint, Devon and the Navy the day before departure, I returned to the family home to find Edith and the children (and the furniture) all gone. With Social Services' support, she had eloped again to escape John. All I could do was wait in the house for him to return from work and see what happened. He threw a pint of milk against the wall, but I was otherwise spared, albeit terrified that he might suddenly cut loose.

The following morning, I travelled to the station with a school friend, John Murphy, who waved me off forever. There wasn’t another family member in sight (they stayed away in case John followed me in order to catch them). My childhood was thus bookended by these two abandonments, leaving it wrapped in emptiness. This repetition forms the outer Ouroberos of my own life, just as the World Serpent , Jörmungandr, encircles the world, and the story I am telling here is of how I have now broken that circle: ‘amor fati’, no thanks.18

Why have I dragged this up? Because it no longer matters as much. I’m sorry to do so, but the ‘not mattering’ would be of little interest without some sense of the enormity of some of what happened. I’m sorry it still matters to my family, but I wanted to speak. I have the luck to see at this stage that the whole broken engine of these things has been nothing but a mill I no longer have to carry. It turns out I spent a lifetime trying to assuage perfectly recalcitrant people into accepting me, when they were incapable of it, through no fault of their own. And then I did it again. And again.

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In that connection, I need to mention the wreckage of my mother’s own childhood, which prepared her for John. Born ‘illegitimate’, her father, a teenage Coventry boy, Jim Kennedy, died of TB weeks before the birth (as indeed, my grandmother, Margaret Alderson, died in the flu epidemic of 1936 giving birth to my father, and was buried in a pauper’s mass grave in Seaham), and she was entirely disowned by his family without further ado.

On her birth, Edith’s family took out an announcement in the Coventry Evening Telegraph so that polite society would know of these circumstances, because “we have to suffer the shame, why shouldn’t they?” Her mother, Florrie, also disowned her, and she was brought up by her grandparents as Florrie’s sister, until her friend, Olive Manning, blurted it out one day in the park: “I know something you don’t know: your sister is your mother!”

She desperately sought what she was not given by her family, but to get it she had to subdue a weak-willed, yodelling husband into marriage and cycles of humiliation. One Christmas, Florrie put the ashes from the grate into Edith’s Christmas stocking: the Norfolk manner of telling you you are unwanted. She wanted desperately to be loved. After John, she would remarry several times, elope from her third marriage with a charming scoundrel who immediately abandoned her, and then marry a Moroccan immigrant ten years younger than me, looking for love in Clapham. Finally, she moved back to King’s Lynn to retire in the very house where her grandmother raised her. She lives there still. Square One. I visit often.

I should mention that, in the 1980s, not long after all this happened, brother Philip recorded some wonderful songs about these times for his indie band, The June Brides. I will only mention the song, No Place Called Home. There were many more:

I want something that I can hold,
I want my life, at my control.
A rock to stand on, to keep me whole,
But each time it slips away, the cause unknown.
In all the places I have lived, I’ve never been at home.
The June Brides, No Place Called Home19

Forgetfulness dumbness necessity in chains of the mind lockd up
In fetters of ice shrinking. disorganizd rent from Eternity
Los beat on his fetters & heated his furnaces
And pourd iron sodor & sodor of brass
Restless the immortal inchaind heaving dolorous
Anguished unbearable till a roof shaggy wild inclosd
In an orb his fountain of thought
William Blake, Vala: Night the Fourth

heaving dolorous
his fountain of thought

Just as Blake in Vala describes the eruption of man-as-such into bodily form, the Genesis of ‘man’, descending into the world of shadows, this itself is also a description, not only of Adam-at-large, but the acquisition of the particular labyrinthine forms of the particular mind, your own peculiar ‘fountain of thought’. It was on this unremembered day that I really blew into existence in the peculiar way I would come to exist. It's good finally to sense the prospect of sliding down from this life-long erupting ‘fountain of thought’ to come home.

vasospasms of the great masturbator: bad brains

I have cheated a little by not explaining perhaps just how well I might have already been prepared for death by experiencing its touch before. As a child, I was terrified of death as the thought of an infinite constriction or claustrophobia, with my end closing in relentlessly. I could have a panic attack just thinking of it.

A brush with death in 2005 changed that. The circumstances in which the centre of my brain (a 3/4” diameter aneurysm, situated ‘sub-arachnoid’—yes! beneath the spider’s web that surrounds and snares the brain—in the `Circle of Willis’) detonated early one morning have just been narrated by me for my friend, Maco Maurizi’s newly released concept album, ‘The Life and Death of Wilhelm Reich’, which riffs on sexual repression and death together.

In this track, recorded like one of Zappa’s paranoid sociological enquiries under the studio piano frame, in 200 Motels, Civilization Phaze III and elsewhere, I raise the question of whether masturbation unto to death can ever be justified. You might want to play this now to hear how this came about, so I can get on with explaining how the outcome upended my fear of mortality forever. You may also want to download the artwork and libretto.

On being rushed to the Royal London for an operation to seal the aneurysm with platinum coils, it seems that the moment the equipment entered my brain (inserted by way of the veins in the leg, with a camera threading the coils, winding its way through your heart before landing at the center of the brain to do its job: a “GDC coiling of anterior communicating artery aneurysm”), my brain simply shut down in a vasospasm, cutting off the blood to the brain. The operation was stopped immediately, and I was returned to the Intensive Care Unit, where my family was told to expect my death at any moment, or, short of that, for me to emerge as paraplegic.

This did not happen. I recall emerging into consciousness again 24 hours later, and a doctor asking me if I knew where I was and who the British Prime Minister was. I told him I was in The Royal London’s ICU, that the Prime Minister was Tony Blair, and that I had some thoughts about his leadership, if anyone cared to hear them. I was alive.

They could not repeat the operation immediately, but only give it a few days to see if the rest would incline the brain to be more cooperative in a second attempt. At the same time, with the aneurysm gaping open, potentially leaking blood into the brain at high pressure, they couldn’t wait much longer. As I was taken down on the trolley early one morning, three days later, for the rematch, when they injected the general anaesthetic and invited me to count down from ten, everyone, including myself, knew these may be my last moments. I experienced a deep sense of contentment, happy with my life. I got to hear John Coltrane and Sun Ra in this life, and swooned happily into unconsciousness. Twelve hours later, I reemerged on the other side, the aneurysm sealed.

I have long considered this the greatest blessing of my life, removing once and for all an ancient fear. A decade later, I learned while training as a death doula that such attitudes at the door to death are far from the exception; it is just that the culture’s egoic obsession, and the fetish of the wholly differentiated mind, set apart from the world, spark panic at the thought of being separated forever. You were never alone in this way, and you never will be. Fellow traveller—bear up.

mumufication, Kali’s ponderable black holes and your fortunate spaghettification

She is the womb that births all, and the tomb that swallows all.
Aditi Devi20

My interest in death now fully awakened after the coiling party, I set out to study as a death doula. According to the End of Life Doula UK body, “an end of life doula is a compassionate, trained companion who supports individuals with a terminal diagnosis and those important to them. Offering support at any age or stage of illness, our non-medical role is to preserve the quality of wellbeing, sense of identity and self-worth from the moment we are called upon”21

My interest in the cultural aspects of dying eventually led me to sign up for Mumufication, and incorporation in the People’s Pyramid at an annual counter-cultural event in Liverpool, hosted by Bill Drummond and the KLF. Twenty-three grams of your ashes are kiln-fired into a brick, which is added ot the base of the pyramid, one for every mumufication volunteer, each year.

Just as impressive to me was my discovery of the deep analogies between Kali as a goddess and the process by which she annihilates her victims in death by tearing away their ego structures, allowing them to disintegrate into the mind-lake. I won’t state the whole argument, but I encourage you to read it separately.

You can download the talk as a [PDF]

concluding post-scientific prescripts
on the haunted shoreline

In thinking through aspects of reincarnation in recent days, I am beholden above all to fellow Faust fan Nick, author of the Surrealist blog, The Haunted Shoreline, where he excavates alchemical and other mysteries on his walks along the Lewes coast.

On hearing news of my illness on the Faust gravevine,22 he set out for the beach with his partner, Anastasia, to look for a sign for me. In his own words: “After a while on the beach, Anastasia... was coming the other way… with something in her hand... She handed me the small stone globe of the fossilised sea urchin. We both knew its significance, as I had previously written about a similar fossil, exploring its historic symbolism as ‘the egg of the World Serpent’ and its association with the idea of resurrection.”

‘This symbol enshrines ideas of motion, continuity, self-fertilisation, and, consequently, of the eternal homecoming… Another interpretation may see in the Ouroboros the contrast between two planes of being. The serpent biting its tail falls into the shape of a circle, a break with its linear development which would seem to be as big a change as emergence upon a higher level of consciousness.” (Jean Chevalier and Alain Gheerbrant)23

But Nietzsche is being trumped here in the fossil, for while the urchin as snake represents the circularity of pagan time, the fossil sea urchin not only represents this Ouroboros, but overcomes it and raises it to the next level, mostly by virtue of how the symbolism morphed anyway with the adoption of Christian culture in the pagan heartlands. Note that Anastasia is a feminine given name of Greek and Slavic origin, derived from the Greek word anástasis, meaning ’resurrection’ or ‘rebirth’, often associated with strength and the concept of returning to life.

On finding the fossil, Nick booked a ticket to see me in Hackney with his gift, which I have right by me now in pride of place on the desk here. Nick added before leaving, “yours is flint, rather than chalk, which seems apt.”

scarlet rain falling: libelling the dead

In looking at the scan images in this post, try to imagine just how surprised I have been to realise that some 2-3 years ago I started working on a long (for me) poem/collage construction, which, for reasons I cannot explain (are there ever any such tidy reasons), I called Scarlet Rain. I have worked on it patiently for some time now.

The techniques used in construction were chosen to be slow and laborious, as I wanted to harness the meditative energy I find in such work, allowing me to incubate ideas and intuitions I am not even aware of as I write or design, drawing on unconscious motivation as best I can, as I tried to explain in a talk to the Blake for Artists group about the fitful creation of my fanzine Blake reader, The Brilliant New Hercules.

You will see from the examples above that I am soon talking of lungs and jaws, ‘Easington irradiation’, blooming bones and the ‘undead bloodsuck’. The work currently stands at more than seventy pages, but remains unfinished. It includes many vignettes and side glances at my family history, as well as thoughts on ‘libelling the dead’.

Finally, for now, a careful reader will have spotted that there is at least one area of life where I have continued to grind away: in writing this blog post. Whenever I haven’t been in pain, in transit, or swimming in morphine over the last few weeks, I‘ve been trying to capture these thoughts in the hope that they will be of interest to those who have followed the drift of the Traveller from the beginning. With the time remaining, I hope to say more.

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Life’s a long song
If you wait then your plate I will fill
Ian Anderson

It’s a bit early in life for all my ideas to have dried up, so I suppose I’ll come up with something.
Bowie (1969)1

I tried to break away from you
From the spics and blacks and the gum you chew
Where the posters are torn by the muggin’ gangs
By the faggy parks and the burnt-out vans
So bob your sweet head
Brother Ziggy going to play
Bowie, Sweet Head (1971)

Before talking about Ziggy-era Bowie, I should say something about my own relationship to his legacy. As a child in the early 70s, from the ages of 12 to 16 (1972-1976), I was hopelessly devoted. I joined the fan club, read everything I could about him, and lived the music in my mind. My school friends and I found each other based solely on a shared dedication to Bowie.

After punk, I lost interest, finding his Berlin albums too reliant on the groups being referenced (Kluster/Cluster, Neu). I was into Throbbing Gristle’s cosmic industrial electronics by then, and didn’t need an extra helping of Eno. Then, the Blitz Club faces were seen gurning their way through the video for Ashes to Ashes: we didn’t fight the punk wars just to dress up all over again.2 On top of this, Bowie became an icon for the idea of the creative entrepreneur ‘pivoting’ between products on the road to ultimate corporate triumph, and we had enough of those at work.

For a long time, I regretted having been so keen on him, seeing it as a weakness of my younger self, and infuriating my brother by arguing that Suede’s Trash summed up everything I liked about Ziggy-era Bowie better than Bowie himself.

But I didn’t think much about this until Bowie’s death, ten years ago this week. Then, one thing after another, reading so many tributes by friends, and watching the film Moonage Daydream – not because of the way it told the story, but its inclusion of full-screen, high quality film of prime Bowie – took me back to the records I loved the first time around, from Hunky Dory through to Aladdin Sane, taking in Space Oddity, The Man Who Sold the World, Pinups and Diamond Dogs at the edges, and it all came flooding back. I think I fell in love again, and a whole new relationship with Bowie started after his death, from the moment I heard Lazarus.

I mention this because it’s so unusual for me to go from admiring music to abandoning it entirely in disgust… then appreciating it to the heights all over again. It’s easy to lose interest in a band, but once lost, the interest seldom revives: you are inoculated because you have seen the naked lunch now and can’t unsee it. Perhaps the speed of my turnaround on Bowie, and its uniqueness in my experience, has distorted my sense of how things were: I don’t know, but I thought I should mention it before beginning.

Air of violence

What struck me in revisiting the Bowie that emerged into public (and my personal) consciousness in the early 70s (roughly, from 1971’s Oh You Pretty Things – the first song Bowie wrote for Hunky Dory, and a manifesto for much that was to come – through to, approximately 1974’s Rebel, Rebel, from Diamond Dogs), was the air of violence and menace that runs through the work.

I was reminded of this while watching the first episode of Danny Boyle’s TV dramatisation of the story of The Sex Pistols. Among the scene-setting shots were images we associate with mid-to-late 1970s inner-city London at night, with half the streetlights broken, rubbish in the streets, and newspapers blowing down the gutters. There was a palpable menace to the scene, but also Bowie as its soundtrack.

This struck me immediately as note-perfect in setting up the story of The Sex Pistols, invoking the (more or less) repressed violence that was an essential part of 70s life and Bowie fandom, and which was a major tributary feeding into the legions of punk a few years later.

The facts I draw on in making the argument are well-known, yet seem somehow to swirl about our memory of Bowie without being integrated into the composite image of him fed back by the media. Increasingly, I began to think that part of what I responded to in Bowie the first time around had been sidelined.

The image we are offered of him at the moment of his breakthrough in the early 70s, is of Bowie as:

• an icon of outrageous style, embodying an assertive, proud individualism (flash-Bowie),

• an embodiment of youthful alienation from the status quo (alien-Bowie): “Bowie’s modus operandi during the Seventies was transformation, acting out the suburban dream of escape into glamorous ‘otherness’”, Ian MacDonald.3 There turn out to be several dimensions to this alienation, as we shall see.

• an advocate of a freer, more open sexuality (queer-Bowie) (“The first rock musician to advertise his solo work on the bone flute”, Keef Roberts)4

But this omits the aura of civilizational decline and a corresponding threat of apocalyptic violence attached to Ziggy, which seems to me as significant a feature of breakthrough-era Bowie as any of the above

The one place where the issue of violence is raised in conjunction with Bowie, even if only implicitly, is in discussions of his relationship with fascism, encapsulated in the photo of him in 1975, in an open-topped Mercedes pulling into Victoria Station after a European tour, apparently giving a Roman salute.

This was one of the events (along with racist ‘banter’ by Eric Clapton in support of Enoch Powell) that inspired the formation of Rock Against Racism, which helped flush out the ambiguities of 1970s youth alienation in favour of antifascism. Ironically, according to photographer Chalkie Davies, Bowie’s hand in the image had been airbrushed in as it was originally too faint to see, “a sliver”, thus creating a storm in a darkroom.

The Supermen and The Morning of the Magicians

Much ink has been spilt over whether Bowie was a fascist sympathiser. Without digging too deep into the evidence and the fog of debate, Bowie seems to me to have been seriously interested in fascism, attracted to, and fascinated by it – but with little understanding of what it was, or what it signified in the public mind. He envisaged it as a spiky and mesmeric romanticism at odds with society, which merged in his mind with occult themes associated with the Nazis by way of, eg, Jacques Bergier and Louis Pauwels’ The Morning of the Magicians (1960) – a regular of countercultural bookshelves of the time, which dealt inter alia with supposed Nazi-occult connections.5

Crucially, Bowie’s occult infatuation focused on the idea of the spiritually perfected being as a higher type, a Nietzschean übermensch, elevated above the run of the mill, a notion for whom his model was Aleister Crowley: “Bowie was attracted to Crowley as a figure of Luciferian grace… wherein Lucifer represents a kind of self-realised dandy, a Baudelaire-like poet who is not afraid to explore the more taboo aspects of sex, will, and intoxication.” (Peter Beregal).6 References to Crowley and supermen appear throughout the short transition period in which Ziggy emerged, all of them rooted in his vision of the ‘homo superior’ in Oh! You Pretty Things.7 Throbbing Gristle would later play from the same Crowleyan deck.

It has been suggested that Bowie lifted his Aladdin Sane face-flash from the British Union of Fascists (BUF), of which his mother, Peggy, had been a member. She kept her BUF uniform in her wardrobe, and the young Bowie would often look at and admire it. It is not at all unlikely that the uniform included a membership pin (see below).8 Coincidentally or otherwise, Throbbing Gristle too were accused of using the BUF sign in their own logo and of normalising fascism: one of a number of suggestive parallels with Bowie.

However, as Peter Beregal also notes, “this notion of a perfected spiritual man, an image Bowie had been playing with since Oh! You Pretty Things, was easily conflated with the idea of the Aryan.”9 Thus, Bowie’s Crowleyite, quasi-Nietzschean will to overcome everyday life was allowed to merge in his mind with woolly notions about fascism as a collective self-overcoming, in which the Führer emerges as an alien rock star, Ziggy Stardust, and his fans play the role of the Nuremberg masses.

In this way, the hippy idea of self-transcendence through spiritual awakening becomes the idea of the hypnotic charisma of the leader, directing the masses. Bowie was at best ambivalent about this identification. He often seemed to embrace that aspect of the Starman which depicted the fans as puppets, dramatising its fascistic potential (“He could kill them by smiling / he could leave them to hang”)10.

It is remarkable how uncritical Bowie fans are when they consider this, taking his disavowals at face value, accepting his complete innocence in the matter. Bowie toyed with fascism; it’s just that his idea of what fascism is was trite. He didn’t know what he was talking about. It would have been alarming and reprehensible if his words actually boosted support for fascism, but, as soon as the controversy arose, he instantly dismissed any sympathy for actual jackbooted fascism.11

The Only Thing That Will Make You See Sense

I raise the business of Bowie and fascism only to get it out of the way, clearing the deck for a focus on violence of a different order, namely, the aura of street violence permeating Bowie’s imagery at the time that he achieved his greatest success. The core components of this imagery begin with ideas of self-transcendence, reflected in Bowie’s fascination with Aleister Crowley.

Bowie’s true breakthrough song, in terms of the development of the Ziggy persona, was Oh! You Pretty Things, which he claims came to him in his sleep, like other substantial works of art and literature before and since: “I woke up and this song was going round in my head. I had to get out of bed and just play it to get it out of me so that I could get back to sleep again.”12 It was, in any case, the distillation of several ideas that had been percolating in his subconscious for a while.

The lyrics references an occult elite (“I think about a world to come / Where the books were bound by the Golden ones”13). The children of this elite are the younger generation of the time (“Oh! you pretty things / Don’t you know you’re driving your mamas and papas insane?”), yet this ‘younger generation’ is also everyone who wants to transcend (“Let me make it plain / Gotta make way for the homo superior!”)

It has been argued that Bowie’s perspective here is that of a new father (which indeed he was), recognising that he’s brought the future into his home, but that one day it will leave him behind.14 This ignores the emotional perspective of his audience, which was not at all that of a new parent, but of the mutant spawn on the other side of the divide. And anyway, Bowie himself did not adopt this fatalistic view (the inevitable cycle of generations), but ran with the teenage pack he was addressing, seeing himself as one of the new, superior breed; arguably as their leader.

All that was needed now to turn this into a framework for the Ziggy Stardust persona was something that put the hook into his listeners by addressing their rising sense of alienation : they are the ‘strangers’ of Oh! You Pretty Things (“All the strangers came today”) – strangers in their own homes. Later, in the image of Ziggy the Starman, these children became not just estranged, but explicitly alien. “And it looks as though they’re here to stay”.

The response to this teenage alienation embodied in Bowie-Ziggy at this point was two-pronged. On the one hand (flash-Bowie), fans celebrated his difference by flaunting it; he encouraged fans to wave their glam-flag high, loudly and unashamedly, in neon colours. The fans were ‘pretty things’ of a self-selecting, self-referential kind: they may or may not have demanded the respect of others, but they always granted it to themselves. This dramatised self-assertion did much to inform the ethos of punk, with its inverted, but parallel, trash aesthetic (Pretty Vacant).

The other face of this alienation was the sense many had of being personally mutant, monstrous, and (optionally) malevolent (alien-Bowie). This monstrousness was easily conceived of as straightforwardly antisocial – but with optional alteriority, strangeness and charm for the more thoughtful types, such as you and I. In this regard, many Bowie fans were essentially upgraded, science-fictional Teddy-Boys, with their chains and flick knives, remade for a post-Social Democratic age. And anyway, weren’t The Pretty Things, namechecked in the song, a hooligan proto-punk psyche band? Bowie was a sincere fan.

With these two responses to alienation, the flash and the monstrous (which merge in the image of the Bowie boot boy or girl), mixed with an occult sense of superiority, Bowie had the makings of his Ziggy character. The basic idea erupts suddenly into existence with Oh! You Pretty Things, but there is also development, as the focus quickly shifts from the claustrophobic occult miasma of The Bewlay Brothers, to the off-world fantasias of Starman and the saga of Ziggy Stardust.15

Already in the lyrics of The Bewlay Brothers are the characteristic signs of Bowie’s decisive new influence: "it was stalking time for the moonboys… real cool traders / we were so turned on… In the crutch-hungry dark was where we flayed our mark.”16 These ‘turned-on traders’, ‘flaying marks’, were, as we will see, probably the rent-boy clientele in “the crutch-hungry dark” of Bowie’s favourite new nightclub.

Roots of the pretty things

One of the reasons I gave up on Bowie forty years ago was that I took him to be always channelling other people’s experiences, not his own. He was ‘a phoney’. This turned out to seriously underestimate Bowie. As we know, the dangerous aura of The Velvet Underground was based quite genuinely on the lives of those associated with the band and with Andy Warhol’s Factory, who experienced abuse, addiction and exploitation.

But something analogous holds for Bowie, who spent time throughout this period at The Sombrero Club, on Kensington High St, a tiny after-hours place favoured by “King’s Road queens, Mandraxed coquettes, hustlers, dandies, fops, tarts, gigolos and speed freaks.”17 The clientele included rent boys on their way to and from work, and others whose lives were similarly violent and/or precarious, all at a time when merely being suspected of being gay, let alone being openly gay, could attract violence on its own account.

Bowie immersed himself in this milieu, soaking up like blotting paper its combination of openly defiant, illicit sexuality, elaborate and outrageous style, and its enveloping aura of danger and violence. He let it seep into his adopted persona, and it increasingly found voice in his songs: “… the Sombrero people began supplying the fuel very quickly; the material on Hunky Dory, the album he was working on in early and middle 1971, came directly from their lives and attitudes.” Angie Bowie.18

One of the immediate results of Bowie’s time at The Sombrero was his declaration, in a famous interview with the Melody Maker in January 1972, “I’m gay, and I always have been...”19 While clearly a risky position to take in public at the time,20 it was arguably less the coming-out of a soul no longer prepared to live a lie than Bowie signalling (to those capable of reading the signals) his identification with the underground gay demi-monde represented by The Sombrero.

Horrorshow platties and a malenky of the old ultra-violence

Hey man, d-droogie don’t crash here
Bowie, Suffragette City, Aladdin Sane

Now that we have the key psychic ingredients in place, all that is required to light the blue touchpaper is an image to act as the catalyst for the emergence of an entire style, and its heart.

Bowie found this image in Stanley Kubrick’s (1971) film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962). Burgess wrote a story promoting the centrality of freedom to ‘civilization’, but it is remembered instead for Kubrick’s rendering of Burgess’ text on screen, its vivid, and instantly memorable depiction of a coming generation of teenage delinquents, alternating between gleefully committing the most horrific crimes of violence, then drifting, bored, through brutalist estates, high on psychedelic milk, speaking a teenage argot, nadsat, composed of fragments of Eastern European (and other) vocabulary, and Cockney rhyming slang.

The narrator, ungrateful teenage tearaway Alex DeLarge (Malcolm McDowell), heads a spectacularly vicious four-man crew, identified by their uniform of bowler hats, white ‘grandad’ shirts, braces and skinny white trousers, a cod piece, and a pair of the ‘bovver boots’ that, as with the braces, were already a feature of real-world (skinhead / hard mod) gang attire in the early 70s.21 Alex loves music. His parents are sepia-coloured drones. We follow Alex as he faces the consequences of his crimes, becoming a victim of the nanny state before recovering his place.

The film caused a media uproar, with claims that it provoked copycat violence inspired by key scenes in the movie, notably, the senseless beating of the old man in the underpass. Kubrick withdrew it from release, but not before teenage hooligans had adopted Alex DeLarge’s style; even the bowler hat, and certainly the combination of white grandad shirt, braces and trousers, with black Dr Martens boots (eye makeup, optional).

During the miners’ strike of 1984-85, I met flying pickets from Yorkshire who told me of having been Clockwork Orange-style skinheads together, complete with bowler hats, who attended Leeds matches in the early 70s as part of their hooligan crew.22 The older skinhead gang in my corner of Coventry at the same time called themselves ‘The King’s Conk’, adopting the uniform, with the addition of a Crombie coat and – a lovely touch – painting the soles of their Dr Martens fluorescent orange, for reasons I can’t recall.

The impact of the film on Bowie was immediate and overwhelming: “It was impossibly direct… the film felt like a sledgehammer… it was the aesthetic… the way it looked. The design of the clothes, I thought, was fascinating.”23 Bowie says he just ‘liked the look’, but after the film’s release, that look signified only one thing: the threat of mindless violence.

Bowie said, “the initial clothes [he] designed for The Spiders From Mars were very much based on the Clockwork Orange jumpsuits.”24 That was the original idea for The Spiders From Mars – they were an urban street gang. Freddie Burretti, the designer Bowie met at The Sombrero, pointed out that an all-white uniformity across the band looked too militaristic, proposing instead that each band member have a different coloured jumpsuit (the jumpsuit here combining Alex’s original grandad shirt and skinny pegs, with the bonus that it no longer required the braces).

The band’s boots were made by a local specialist in making and fitting boxing boots. According to Spiders’ drummer, Woody Woodmansey, even the codpieces were incorporated into the design; “The Droogs also wore a codpiece, and Freddie [Burretti] used an idea from the Stirling Cooper jeans to simulate this idea, adding a separate piece of fabric cut in a zigzag from the waist down to the crotch on either side.”25

Soon, jumpsuits were being made for Bowie in vivid patterned colours with various add-ons and modifications; but, however the suits were modified, the look of The Spiders From Mars as they first emerge is unquestionably that of a dystopian street gang.

The question is whether Freddie’s de-militarising modifications undermined the centrality of that ultra-violent identity. Bowie says the suits were made “out of very flowery material, very feminine material, very colourful”, adding, “I thought the juxtaposition of the violence inherent in the worker-like clothes with the kind of very soft sensuality of the fabric we chose was… interesting.”26

If we take the new colourings to be ‘feminine’, as Bowie claims, then yes, you have something of a corrective to toxic male violence. However, if the colouring and extravagance reflect, not essentially the ‘feminine’, but rather the gay ambience of The Sombrero, filtered through Bowie and the suit’s designer, fellow Sombrero habitué, Freddie Burretti, then the violent image of the street gang is not diluted, but redirected, skewed, and queered.

Another expression of this fusion of futuristic violence and queer aesthetics is in Bowie’s merging of the Nadsat invented by Burgess for his novel – in which something ‘horrorshow’ is good, and your ‘droogs’ are your friends, your gang – with the Polari slang long spoken among gay men, picked up from friends old and new. In the same interview where Bowie came out to the press, the interviewer noted, he “uses words like ‘verda’… quite a lot,”27 where ‘verda’ is ‘vada’, polari for ‘look’, (which neatly mirrors the Nadsat ‘viddy’, from the Russian, ‘vidyet’, to see.) This droog-polari argot stayed with Bowie until the end, featuring in his lyrics as late as his final album, Blackstar:

You viddy at the cheena
Choodesny with the red rot
Libbilubbing litso-fitso
Devotchka watch her garbles
Spatchko at the rozz-shop
Split a ded from his deng, deng
Viddy, viddy at the cheena
Bowie, Girl Loves Me, Blackstar28

In the classic Haddon St photos taken by Brian Ward for the cover of the Ziggy Stardust LP, Bowie manifests Ziggy in a side street of the city, off Regent St, wearing a patterned Clockwork Orange combat suit, tight around the legs, trousers turned up at the calves to show a huge pair of red boxing boots. If Ziggy looks like an alien creature just beamed down into the alleyway, as we are constantly encouraged to believe, he nevertheless seems every bit as much a street thug hiding by a telephone box, surrounded by urban detritus, ready to attack you with his guitar. The contrasting images are subject to a sort of parallax effect in a bifurcated cultural space.

To underline the point of Ziggy Stardust’s origins in A Clockwork Orange, in the first run of Ziggy gigs, in 1972-1973, the Spiders took to the stage to the tune of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, as interpreted by Walter / Wendy Carlos for the soundtrack to A Clockwork Orange. The same music was resurrected for the 1990 Sound and Vision tour openings, emphasising the continuity of the connection beyond the Ziggy years: an after-echo.

In short: teenage hooligans of the time did not just coincidentally turn out to be Bowie fans, being in the same time and place – the Ziggy persona itself carried with it a hint of monstrous, antisocial violence, which (some) fans embraced, and which underwrote an emerging view of society as alienated and alienating. This strand of Bowie fandom blended seamlessly into punk.

Pull down the wires

Another way to draw out this aspect of Bowie’s legacy is in his work with Mott the Hoople. Bowie wrote All the Young Dudes for the group to kick-start their spluttering career, which was faltering despite their being notoriously raucous live, with a devoted core following. They needed chart success, and Bowie gave it them. More than that, All the Young Dudes’ lyrics touch directly on some key themes here: “The television man is crazy / Saying we’re juvenile delinquent wrecks… We never got it off on that revolution stuff / What a drag / Too many snags.”

Here, the source of generational alienation is arguably the failure of “that revolution stuff”, which we could think of as social democracy and the liberal state, and its promise of eternal progress and endless expansion, whose end was being heralded even this early, despite the miners’ strikes of 1972 and 1974. All generations rebel, they say, but the background against which youth rebelled then was the entire old way of doing things, reaching back to the post-WWII settlement in the West. It was unknown to anyone what we were rebelling in favour of, but it had to be done. A new, post-liberal world was getting underway, and, through the static of the counterculture and its occulture, Bowie was tuning in to it.

As if to underline these points, on the 1973 Ziggy tour, Oh! You Pretty Things and All the Young Dudes were played as a medley, painting a single picture of the roots of generational trauma and the wilfully-embraced alienation that responded to it.

In the wake of Bowie’s jump-start, Mott the Hoople recorded proto-punk works ringing with a hipper, more knowing version of the droog ethos, in songs such as Violence,(“the only thing that will make you see sense”), Marionette, and, spectacularly, in Crash Street Kids, with its lyrics:

Pull down the wires, set you on fire - I’m getting too tired to resist,
We’ll torture your flats, you keep us like rats - then you
Tell ‘em we’re brats and the press twist our fist - get me out of this
Mess.
Hear me swear, hear every word, I ain’t just a number
I wanna be heard. The TV announcer he talks to the sccuuummmm.
I ain’t been solved, I’m uninvolved, I’ve been annulled
And I can’t seem to prove it.
You’re so pure, you know the cures, just keep us poor:
The juvenile delinquent … bit
Mott the Hoople, Crash Street Kids29

This brilliant proto-punk rant is rooted firmly in the Ziggy mythos. That it could presage punk is no mystery when you know that Mick Jones of The Clash followed the group devotedly on tour, as did other early punk scenesters, as well as characters like Kris Needs, who ran Mott’s fan club but also helped put on one of Bowie’s first Ziggy performances, then later was often part of The Clash’s crew.

Where have all the bootboys gone?

Another thread running from Bowie to punk is via those punk bands whose roots were among the Bowie boot boys. That would certainly include Wythenshaw’s Slaughter and the Dogs, first-generation punks who supported the first Sex Pistols at their infamous first gig in Manchester, at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on 20 July 1976, and recorded the hooligan anthem Where Have All the Bootboys Gone?

Singer Wayne Barrett recalls the origins of the band among Manchester United’s Bowie bootboys: “When you went to see Manchester United, you’d see Bowie boys there too... Bootboy is a mix of skin and glam… The name Slaughter and the Dogs was something I made up last minute before a gig. It came from Mick Ronson’s Slaughter on 10th Avenue and Bowie’s Diamond Dogs.”30 None more Bowie.

Bootboy rock forms a genre overlapping glam and punk alike, embracing bands from Mott, Slade and Geordie through to Hector and the Hammersmith Gorillas, The Heavy Metal Kids, and on to punks The Angelic Upstarts, Slaughter and the Dogs, The Lurkers, Menace and The Adicts. (who reverted to the original droog uniform). Bowie’s influence formed a pole within this strand of 70s rock, not the whole thing, which arguably tailed off into Oi! at the other extreme to Bowie’s influence.

As I say, none of the facts I’ve marshalled are new. But I can’t help but feel the absence of this aspect of Bowie’s creation from most culture industry commentary on the anniversary of his death, and even in the memories of individuals: it’s almost as if the one shapes the other.

Did I mention that my nickname throughout the seven years I was in the Royal Navy (1975-1982), was ‘Ziggy’: “Sailors, fighting in the dancehall / Oh man! Look at those cavemen go!”

A friend’s very special birthday party gave me a chance to air some of the ideas I have been discussing in recent months. When I say that I’ve been exchanging these ideas with friends, I mean above all, Timothy Morton, with whom I have been in discussion since reading his book, Hell: in Search of a Christian Ecology. Our ideas have been so entangled of late that I find it hard to say now who first mentioned a particular idea, or where one person’s idea leaves off and another’s begins. Consequently, while I can't say for certain what Tim feels about any particular detail of what I say below, I know he’s sympathetic to the ideas generally, and likely inspired the best of them himself.

In any case, while I can't attribute anything specifically to Tim, at the same time, I can't take credit alone for any part of what follows. I owe further debts to those who contributed to The Traveller in the Evening in pursuing particular thinkers and ideas – Stuart Kendall on Georges Bataille, and Stephen Hastings King on Cornelius Castoriadis.

I was invited to speak by another friend, Emerson Tan, whose midlife-crisis 50th birthday party was transformed by him into a festival of ideas, from generative music, through a scriptwriting workshop, through to the talks and tech demos, not to mention pizza and Goth DJs. Reading between the lines, my brief from Emerson was that I talk about any weird philosophical topic whatsoever that his friends, many of them creatives of some kind, and many tech hackers, might get some use or entertainment from.

I thought I’d take the easy route and address the several millennia of history from the dawn of agriculture through to Trump’s MAGA blitzkreig, accelerationism and the climate disorder of today, all together, all at the same time, and let people make of it what they will.

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I reminded my fellow party-goers of the scene in the film Planes, Trains and Automobiles, where Steve Martin’s character informs John Candy that, "when you are telling a story… have a point! It makes it more interesting for everybody.” I felt I had to warn the audience that they may feel at the end of my presentation that I hadn't really had a point, since I don’t have any glib recommendations to conclude with.

One of the earliest books to impress me when I started reading for myself after leaving home was the geneticist, CH Waddington's Tools for Thought,1 an early defence of systems theory. Each chapter describes a mental model you might use in thinking about a topic. He argued that the ideas he offered were tools we should use when it is useful to do so. He doesn’t say that ideas are ‘merely’ tools: it is not that these ideas don't have a relationship to Truth, it's just that we don't always know what that relationship is, yet we can pursue Truth through them. I wanted to offer a few ideas as such ‘tools’.

In that spirit, I ended up presenting a series of ideas I think are vital for understanding our current predicament. Given the implications of the ideas and the deep-rootedness of our common sense opposition to some of them, I never imagined I would be persuasive about some wider view. I thought of it as laying out notions for inspection, which I propose might combine to tell us something of how we got from the dawn of agriculture to the new fascist populism of today, twinned with hellish climate disruption.

The title of my talk mentioned Algorithms and AI because I thought those topics might get the attention of some of the audience. But the argument holds. The big idea is that the rise of agriculture is associated with a corresponding emergence of a series of notions, ideas, intuitions and presuppositions, which I follow Tim Morton in calling ‘agrilogistics’. These form part of the architecture of the Labyrinth of the social imaginary, constructed collectively through the historic exercise of imagination. We must leave this Labyrinth.

I started by mentioning some of the key texts and ideas I would be referring to; William Blake’s ideas of energy, reason and imagination in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; David Graeber and David Wengrow’s recent study of ancient and early societies, The Dawn of Everything; The writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, especially Crossroads in the Labyrinth; Plato, Aristotle, the Great Chain of Being. Pseudo-Dionysus and hierarchy; Luke Kemp’s Goliath’s Curse, on the long-term increase in rates of exploitation in social hierarchies; the revelatory accounts of Christianity in its relation to the state in David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions; and finally, some mention is made of the Surrealist promise of a revolutionary myth, with reference to George Bataille’s secret society, Acéphale.

Energy, Reason, Imagination

In one of his most radical texts, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), William Blake inverts the traditional view of religion as being concerned with the exercise of judgmental reason, in opposition to unruly human energies which must be tamed. Blake instead sees reason as blind and empty, now naked, a mere tide mark left by the exercise of energy (a reification, Marx might have said). In Blake’s mythology, this is represented by one of the Four Zoas, Urizen (‘your reason’); a blind god driven mad by his own insufficiency, not unlike the gnostic demiurge.

Blake’s demons and angels swap places eternally in his work, because his devils are really angels, seen from the point of view of other demons… who imagine themselves to be angels. Hence, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, some of Blake’s most vital thoughts are contained among his ‘Proverbs of Hell’. This is Blake’s great ‘reversal of perspectives’.

Blake’s most fundamental insight is that “All Things Exist in the Human Imagination;”2 that the imagination “is Spiritual Sensation.”3 In the history of philosophy, the foundational role of the imagination – its ability to create and support the entirety of our thought – has been almost entirely supressed. It appears in Aristotle, Kant and Heidegger; but what can reason say about a power which itself constitutes reason, while reason’s clean reputation rests on its assumed ability to account for itself, solvent, without external support. The omnipotence of the imagination gives the lie to this. Blake puts the imagination at the center of all knowing, and hence of all perception (“A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.”)4

The distinction to be made here is reflected in the argument between Coleridge and Wordsworth on the nature of the imagination, with Wordsworth seeing it as a power of fancy that merely rearranges what is already known to us, while Coleridge saw it as the fundamental power of creation ex nihilo, creation from nothing. Coleridge called this the ‘esemplastic’ (‘form-shaping’) imagination. Coleridge’s implication is that it is the imagination which creates even the unity of perception. Blake’s imagination is even more radical than Coleridge’s.

Castoriadis has written of how society is the product of the exercise of this human imagination, embodied in a social imaginary, which itself may be socially embedded (the instituted imaginary). In any case, the ‘imaginary’ I speak of is the radical imagination which ultimately constitutes everything, foundational to thought itself, even to experience, and represented in our social institutions.

The historical exercise of the human imagination is not predetermined, but open-ended. Today, we experience its objective forms not only as the social structures we are born into but even at the very foundations of the thoughts we bring to bear on those structures.

The Labyrinth and Agrilogistics

I proposed specifically that the rise of agricultural society and the first ‘civilizations’ gave rise to many of the main features of our very ways of thinking – in terms of hierarchy, subject-object relations, propitiation, master-slave dialectics, and hierarchy (among others).

We Mesopotamians are forbidden from stepping outside Mesopotamian thought space. To do so designates you as insane or stupid – for instance, you might be accused of being a primitivist or of appropriating non-Western cultures. All that stuff about how non-humans have spirits shimmering around them, or is it within them, or is it beside them, is reserved for the distant past and for those who in French are called ‘aliens’ (the mad), a telling term for beings beyond the pale, the boundary marker of the agrilogistic dwelling structure.
Timothy Morton5

The Greek myth of the Minotaur and the Labyrinth offers us an appropriate model for thinking about the structures of psyche in which we discover ourselves. The current configuration of the Labyrinth is playing out its logic in the form of populism and white nationalism, and the ongoing environmental collapse; therefore, we must knit a modern Ariadne’s thread to get us out. We cannot simply reverse course and back out, in the way of Perseus, because we don’t know how we got here in the first place.

The entrance to the Labyrinth is at once one of its centres — or, rather, we no longer know whether there is a centre, what a centre is. Obscure galleries lead away on every side, entangled with others coming from we know not where, going, perhaps, nowhere. We should never have crossed this threshold; we should have stayed outside. But we are no longer even certain that we had not always crossed it already, that those asphodels, whose white and yellow radiance returns at times to disconcert us, ever bloomed anywhere but on the insides of our eyelids. The only choice we still keep is to follow this gallery rather than that other into the darkness, without knowing where we shall be led, or whether we shall not be brought back eternally to this same crossroads — or to another exactly like it.
Cornelius Castoriadis6

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Uncivilised Goliath, Leviathan and Energy Extraction

The early ‘civilizations’ that grew up alongside agriculture are better seen as new dominance hierarchies emerging out of some earlier configurations of society. These new ‘Goliath’s’ (borrowing the language of Luke Kemp’s study of societal collapse, Goliath’s Curse) slowly evolved increasingly efficient means of extracting surplus energy from subject peoples.

Particularly important to agrilogistic thinking is the idea of hierarchy, of virtue above descending through a series of emanations down toward dumb matter. This vertical thinking is exemplified by several key ideas in the thought of the West; for example, in Aristotle’s idea of a great chain of being (scala natura) stretching from the highest to the lowest; and in Plato’s idea of The One as transcendent being, compared to the lower material world from which we perceive them only obscurely. All kinds of mechanisms have been proposed for bridging the gap between the One and the Many,

The 6th-7th Century neoplatonist, Pseudo-Dionysus, coined the term ‘hierarchy’ to describe a system of descending layers reaching from God on high, down through successive layers of seraphim, cherubim, angels, and so on, creating the model for the modern company org chart, but also, more seriously, a mental framework which reflected reified political power at the time of the emergence of the early modern states. Such a structure is clearly reflected elsewhere, in, eg., Kaballah, with its descent from Kether (the Crown), across the abyss, all the way down to Malkuth (the World).

An AI Chip Is a Plantation for Electrons

The control promised by microprocessors and cybernetic systems is an extension of the first systems of annual cycles of planting and crop rotations, via years of development of other forms of management and control which increasingly reduce the labourer to a cipher, less than a smudge: from the earliest clocks that integrated the economy by coordinating time management across ever greater geographical areas, through time management systems, time and motion management and Taylorism. With each iteration of control, the means of control become more finely nuanced and intensive, while the human subjected to them slowly becomes a mere tool of the process of control.

The years of varied growth and elaboration of the Labyrinth as a whole have accumulated many hierarchical structures of exclusion and forms of oppression along the way. These structures of control (racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and indeed, normativity generally) are always capable of resuscitation and retooling, as is being done today by populist movements around the world, intensifying hatred against the oppressed and dispossessed. Their attempts to oppress any particular group are part of a generalised assault on all those they can deem inferior, and can thus justify ‘cleansing’ from the system. Frankly, the attraction for the rightist here is less what’s to be cleaned as it is in the act of cleaning.

As the early state grew, it supported emergent capitalism, “red in tooth and claw” in its first rounds of primitive accumulation (colonialism, empire, slavery). Later, the state brokered and policed a stand-off between labour and capital, providing welfare to labour in return for its collaboration with capital. Now that enterprises – particularly the tech giants – so easily straddle borders, the most ruthless among the elites now wish to cut the welfare state loose, abandon support for the disadvantaged, prevent the regulation of capitalist enterprises, abandon efforts needed to mitigate climate disaster, and so on.

We are entering a perfect storm in which the culture of the Goliath can only persist at the expense of the people who will be the first victims of system collapse. But if we want to challenge Goliath, we have to break with its mindset. How to do so? We face a fundamental crisis of the social imaginary, mired as it is in millennia of elitist gerrymandering of our very minds.

In the absence of any conclusion as such, I talked about how I believed that the key to undoing the social imaginary lies not in science but in myth. In the face of rising fascism in their own time, and with Breton having broken with the Communist Party, the Surrealists began to explore the creation of a new popular myth that would mobilise people against fascism.

Georges Bataille formed the secret society, Acéphale, aimed at creating such a myth. These attempts failed for a number of reasons. Nevertheless, the answer to unlocking the Labyrinth must lie at the subterranean level of myth, where idea, transpersonal agency, and psyche combine. Bataille’s mistake was to think that he could summon up unreason to schedule.

I didn’t say so in my presentation, but the ‘myth’ we need is perhaps the Christian spirit and myth as Blake knew it.

View the entire presentation online.

Download the entire presentation [PDF].

The vision the eye records is always impoverished and uncertain. Imagination fills it out with the treasures of memory and knowledge, with all that is put at its disposal by experience, culture, and history.
Roger Caillois

Considering a red cabbage in the kitchen recently, it occurred to me how odd it is that the Surrealists made so little use of the wonder-inducing properties of such vegetables, and why they hadn’t speculated further and more widely on the implications of their existence.

At the root of the problem – in the matter of vegetables, we are obliged to follow roots right back to the earliest radish1 – is probably that, whatever else you say about them, the first generation of surrealists were the types to have left the cooking to the women comrades. Maybe they thereby let slip an opportunity to go scrying around the kitchen.

I found a number of Surrealist, and quasi-Surrealist images which used vegetables somehow, but always as props to the image, not focusing on the alteriority and suggestiveness of the vegetable as a point of departure.

In our original cabbage, when I shared it with friends, some saw echoes of Munch’s shop-worn Scream – their cabbage boiled down into soggy expressionist yelping, hands clapped to his ears. Others saw Chthulu, inverted.

Surprisingly, no one mentioned proto-Surrealist Giuseppe Alchimboldo (1527-1593), who complemented his traditional 16th-century Mannerist portraits of the Holy Roman Emperors with a sideline in rendering his sitters as assemblages of fruits and vegetables, fish or other handy objects. These portraits, however much they rattle the cages of conventional vision and hint at fantastic vistas beneath the skin and the personality, do not explore the mantic properties of the materials themselves, but only make use of their general form.

Dali achieved an uncannily similar lightweight effect in his book of recipes, Les dineurs de Gala (1973), very much a product of his late style and not much more notable than most other celebrity cookbooks, other than that someone is bound to think of it in connection with vegetables and surrealism.

More honourable is the work of Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, both of whom projected images of the kitchen as a site of female alchemical transformation, thus taking up the slack left by the gender-bias of Breton et al. It doesn’t do to dwell for too long on the shortcomings of the earliest Surrealists in this regard, since all the evidence shows that the sometimes unravelling thread of their geneder politics was not abandoned but taken up and knit into something stronger by the same Surrealism. Part of the problem lies less with the Surrealists themselves than with the gendered way in which they attracted, or failed to attract, public attention.

Outside of references to food and cooking, where is the surrealistic fascination with the very form of some of these root materials? Here we leave the fleshy world of biology to focus on longer-term, subterranean natural processes, because the obvious answer to the question lies with the work of Roger Caillois, one of a group of dissident Surrealists aligned with Georges Bataille in the 1930s and beyond. In his 1970 work Les lecteurs de pierres2 / The Writing of Stones3, Caillois uses the stones he studies (including many agates, jaspers, onyxs, chalcedony and limestones) as ready-made ‘stains’ through which the imagination is refracted into sights and visions.4 Instead of automatism, we go straight to nature itself, and catch it dreaming.

Who knows whether this tumult of triangles inscribed in stone, first brought about by nature and then by art, does not contain one of the secret cyphers of the universe?
Roger Caillois

I see the origin of the irresistible attraction of metaphor and analogy, the explanation of our strange and permanent need to find similarities in things. I can scarcely refrain from suspecting some ancient, diffused magnatism; a call from the center of things; a dim, almost lost memory, or perhaps a presentiment, pointless in so puny a being, of a universal syntax.
Roger Caillois

Just as, eg, Max Ernst used frottage as the basis for hallucinated landscapes such as his Europe After the Rain, others had painted over chosen stones as they suggested images to the artists. Caillois discusses examples such as works illustrating Aristo’s Orlando Furioso in the Museum of Florence., which bear comparison with Ernst for the unsettling effect of the landscape created.

Caillois goes further than recognising the prophetic, ‘mind-revealing’, esemplastic potential of the forms he studies when they act on us. He sees in them not only a goad to the exercise of our human powers, but a natural power which runs parallel to the human imagination itself, mirroring it and underlying it, such that the human mind and the natural processes that created the stones alike participate in a universal mode of expression and communication not reliant on structuralism or semiotics, but woven into the fabric of matter itself.

“I gradually gave up regarding man as external to nature, its end,” said Caillois. Far from disparaging what is human, as has been alleged, he found it all along a scale ranging from molecules to the stars. Because he claimed to observe the presence throughout the universe of a sensibility and a consciousness both the analogies to our own, he has been accused of anthropomorphism. But Caillois himself has argued passionately that on the contrary he advocated an inverted anthropomorphism in which man, instead of contributing his own emotions, sometimes condescendingly, to all living beings, shares humbly, yet perhaps also with pride, in everything contained or innate in all three realms, animal, vegetable, and mineral. In short, there had taken place in that great intellect the equivalent of the Copernican Revolution: man was no longer the centre of the universe, except in the sense that the centre is everywhere.
Marguerite Yourcenar5

The strange markings in an agate lead me suddenly into wild extrapolations, seeking, in the obscure workings taking place with a stone at the dawn of time, traces of similar abortions. By their very strangeness the failures they perpetuate become for me so many speaking portents, or at least emblems. They somehow announce the coming, in the distant future, of a species that makes mistakes, being in whom freedom and imagination, together with their necessary disappointments, will be more important than successes due to infallible and inevitable mechanics. They presage new powers, imperfect but creative.
Roger Caillois6

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Michael Moynihan (of Non, Blood Axis, Coup de Grace and Sleep Chamber, and a regular collaborator with other pro-Fascist musicians in the neo-folk, martial industrial and noise milieus) has miraculously acquired a reputation as something of a Fascist intellectual, as he is also a writer, editor and publisher of a range of books, magazines and journals.1

Moynihan was a member of the Abraxas foundation, which co-founder Boyd Rice hoped would attract “a new demographic of people who are into the occult, Fascism, and Social Darwinism”. Along with Didrik Søderlind he authored the commercially successful Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground, which glamorised the Norwegian Black Metal scene while analysing it within the framework of his own occult Fascist concerns. He is also an associate of Adam Parfrey, whose Feral Press has established itself as a major source of Fascist esoterica.

Moynihan’s journal, Tyr, promotes a range of Fascist thinkers as well as corresponding pagan and occult notions, publishing pseudo-scientific articles and clunky political, cultural and music reviews aimed largely at promoting the works of his co-thinkers in the Fascist and pagan underground. Having read a fair amount of his work, I think it’s safe to say that Moynihan’s reputation as an intellectual is more an index of the intellectual poverty of the radical right rather than proof of substantial talent on his part.

Nevertheless, it is perhaps not so surprising that Moynihan should posses at least the rudiments of literary and intellectual skills since he is the product of a wealthy Boston family that could afford to send him to the elite Buckingham Browne & Nichols private school then prop him up long enough for him to get a (similarly elite) Fulbright scholarship to fund his further ‘research’. Perhaps he even belongs to one of those Boston Moynihan clans that have provided so many members of the American ruling class, including the current CEO of the Bank of America (and who are known about town as ‘the Brahmins’).

In any case Moynihan seems to be one of that species of aristo-Führers who offer themselves up as mentors to the mass of lumpen Nazis, offering a veneer of ‘posh’ and gravitas while seeking to harness them to their own peculiar occult, racist and anti-democratic fantasies of power and violence (’Baron’ Julius Evola was similar).

Confusion about what constitutes contemporary Fascist ideology means that Moynihan and his friends have been able to fool some into thinking he is something other than a dyed-in-the-wool Fascist just because his ideas are eccentric and differ somewhat from historical National Socialism and Fascism: he has been variously described as an extreme Rightist, an extreme Leftist, a Nazi and an anarchist. Moynihan has tried to sow such confusion himself, hoping it will obscure his real agenda.

Despite this, at times he has also been disarmingly clear about his orientation; for instance, arguing against what he considers merely ‘aesthetic Fascism’ (in an argument probably aimed at Boyd Rice, with whom he’d had a falling out around this time): “I’m sick of people saying they’re ‘not political’ as I think this is a cop-out... If you’re going to espouse fascist ideas, then I believe you have to accept some of the responsibility for their application in the real world; otherwise what is the point of espousing them in the first place?”2

I’ll write about some of Moynihan’s other publishing and literary efforts in future. Here I want to focus on one book he has played a central role in bringing to the public’s attention - Siege, by James Mason. While I think it’s easy to show that Moynihan is indeed a Fascist there’s no reason why we shouldn’t take time off from teasing away at the usual dreary existential question (“what does he really think?”) and look instead at what he publishes, on the grounds that it’s perfectly appropriate to judge someone by what they do as much as by what they say about it. Moynihan can argue what he likes about his own politics, but what he chooses to publish speaks for itself, and in the case of James Mason, it is difficult to understand why anyone would want to publish his work unless they sought to promote a particular type of racial and ‘political’ violence.

Siege: The Collected Writings of James Mason collects together articles from the Nazi journal of the same name, written by Mason between 1980 and 1986. The collection was edited and first published in 1992 by Moynihan, who also wrote an introduction under the pseudonym Michael M. Jenkins, on his own ‘Storm’ imprint. It was reprinted and republished by Black Sun Press in 2003 without Moynihan’s introduction but with a new preface by Mason and additional historical material in the appendices.

Since I’ve only been able to find a copy of the later Black Sun edition online I don’t know what Moynihan had to say in the original introduction, but the rest of the material, at least as far as Mason’s essays are concerned, is identical. It seems reasonable to ask; who is James Mason, and why would Moynihan be prepared to spend his own time and money editing and publishing a deluxe edition of his collected ravings?

James Mason is maybe as close as anyone could get to being a genuine lifelong Nazi. Having started out as a teenage supporter of Richard Nixon, Barry Goldwater and George Wallace, in 1966 his life changed forever when he was loaned a book about extremist politics (Extremism USA) and liked what he read there about the Nazis. At the age of only fourteen he joined the miniscule American Nazi Party (ANP). Sometime after that, still aged only sixteen, he ran away from his home in Ohio to join the ANP headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

There he lived for a number of years, working alongside the Ku Klux Klan to organise attacks on leftists and civil rights and anti-war protesters as well as helping with the general running of America’s main (albeit tiny) Fascist party. He was admitted into full membership of the party on his eighteenth birthday. Here it was too that he was introduced to the ideas of one of his great heroes, George Lincoln Rockwell, the founder and leader of the ANP who had defiantly spurned bourgeois opinion by openly embracing Nazism and the swastika (thus, in Rockwell’s words crossing “the threshold of anger”3).

Shortly after renaming the party the National Socialist White People’s Party (NSWPP) and adopting the slogan ‘White Power’, Rockwell was killed by a fellow Nazi in 1967 and the ANP was taken over by Matt Koehl, after which it splintered into a number of groups amidst of the usual welter of denunciations, accusations and counter-accusations familiar to any student of the extreme right.

Thus far, Mason’s career had been unremarkable for a hard-core Nazi of the time. Overflowing with racist hatred for Jews and Blacks, he worshipped Adolf Hitler as his ideal and saw in Rockwell a ‘strong man’ and potential Führer who could lead the American people into their racial utopia. Mason was from the beginning a super-militant Nazi. Regarding the Jews he seems almost disappointed at one point to find himself toeing the Nazi line on holocaust denial, being keener himself on an open policy of annihilation: “it was indeed a damnable shame that Hitler did not, in fact, kill at least six million Jews during the war. We... know what the Jews were and are all about and we can shed no tears for any of them.“

Mason’s line from the mid-70s on was that such violence should be extended not only to Jews, Blacks and Socialists, but also to most of the rest of the American people, believing that “the masses... live only to produce and consume; to masticate and defecate. Wasted exercises in protoplasm. Here only to breathe the air and take up space. No really valid reason for living”4. And Mason doesn’t leave much to the imagination when it comes to his preferred solution to this mess: “for the United States there will be no need for concentration camps of any kind, for not a single transgressor will survive long enough to make it to that kind of haven.”5

The acrimonious collapse of the NSWPP and the descent of the US Nazi movement into a nest of squabbling sects was a blow for Mason, but he soon found another strong man to look up to and admire in the form of Joseph Tommasi (“the first of a new breed. A hero and martyr to the cause.”)6 Like Mason, Tommasi was an ultra-radical NSWPP hothead. Both were close to senior NSWPP member William Pierce, who had personally encouraged and helped organise Mason’s original flight from school to ANP headquarters. Pierce went on to write The Turner Diaries, a novel which imagines a successful Nazi revolution precipitated by a ‘lone wolf’ killer, and which has inspired a number of Nazi terrorists over the years, including ‘London Nail Bomber’ David Copeland, who targeted the city’s Black, Asian and Gay communities in Brixton, Brick Lane and Soho respectively, killing three people and injuring 129.

Tommasi’s contribution to the cause was to create a new, underground Nazi group, the National Socialist Liberation Front (NSLF). The NSLF was originally formed, with encouragement from Pierce, as the youth wing of the NSWPP, and set out to work on college campuses (one early recruit was a young student in Louisiana, David Duke, later to become Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan). From the start the NSLF represented a significant break with traditional US Nazism, which remained rooted in the social mores and attitudes (and even much of the Cold War, McCarthyite politics) of the 40s and 50s.

Tommasi himself looked more like a drop-out than the kind of starched collar-and-tie conservative favoured by the party leadership. He was concerned to bring National Socialism up to date by borrowing widely from the symbols, attitudes and language of the New Left to connect with a new generation. Thus, the name of the group itself was borrowed from the Symbionese Liberation Army, and the name of the NSLF journal, Siege, later taken over by Mason, was also borrowed, this time from The Weathermen.

The NSLF favoured the pop visual imagery, iconoclasm and sometimes even the actual ideas of the far left, adopting such typically Maoist slogans as ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ and ‘The future belongs to the few of us willing to get our hands dirty. Political terror: it’s the only thing they understand’. It is this modernising aspect of Tommasi’s legacy, along with the fetishising of Fascist revolutionary violence, that explains his appeal to counter-cultural Fascists today.

The NSLF was not established as a separate organisation until Tommasi, despite years of personal loyalty, was expelled from the NSWPP in one of Koehl’s episodic purges simply for smoking marijuana, drinking and ‘entertaining women’ in the party’s offices. The inaugural meeting of the newly independent group took place on March 2nd 1974 in El Monte, California and attracted 43 supporters. This formal break with the NSWPP radicalised Tommasi even further, or allowed his radicalism full expression, and the meeting adopted a set of theses which broke definitively with the ‘mass strategy’ of the Nazi mainstream in favour of armed revolution and ‘leaderless resistance’;

No longer could we think in terms of obtaining political power through the electorate but, instead, of hurting the enemy through force and violence. We would build the armed struggle.
We have abandoned petit-bourgeois, bureaucratic hang-ups and have developed the idea that the ends justifies the means. What works is good.
We recognise the fact that the masses of Whites will never rally around radical parties... The Whites... don’t have the guts to shed their bourgeois hang-ups.
We view armed struggle as the only effective means of forcing political change.7

Mason himself didn’t join the NSLF, remaining a member of the NSWPP for sometime before finally tiring of it, and as a practical organisation the new grouping fell flat on it’s face almost immediately: Tommasi was murdered only a year later by another Nazi in a brawl outside the NSWPP’s LA offices, and his two key lieutenants were arrested shortly after for firearms violations. The NSLF underground effectively died with Tommasi except as a beacon to other ultra-radicals such as Mason.

What is significant about Tommasi is not anything concrete he might have achieved (from a Fascist point of view) but simply the idea, which he is identified with, of finally breaking with overground political activity aimed at persuasion or acceptance of any kind (other than making propaganda in support of NSLF terrorism) in favour of amoral, unconstrained violence directed against ‘racial enemies’ (Jews and anyone not certifiably white, and especially mixed couples), leftists, anti-racists and civil rights campaigners of any description, the ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ (ZOG) and its servants (anyone with any kind of role or job with the state, from elected representatives and the police down to the lowliest of state employees; “from President to dogcatcher”,8 as Mason put it), drug users, homosexuals, perverts, feminists, deviants and so on (ie. anyone ‘impure’). Tommasi has become a pin-up boy for every Fascist who ever fantasised about unleashing their violence directly on their neighbours.

The NSLF represented to Mason the apotheosis of Fascist narcissism, its point of orgasm, allowing him psychically to unshackle his rage from any remaining grounding in political calculation or moral propriety, or any compunction or limitation at all, allowing it instead (in his mind, at least) to be applied without mediation: the only practical consideration from now on was trying to make sure you didn’t get caught.

In Mason’s typically Fascist-occult mind, reality itself is a wasteland, fatally riddled with impurity, corruption and decay; the cities are “death zones” in which “the lowest common denominator genetic miasma has you badly outnumbered”. He concludes; “Let the cities go to HELL, right where they came from! If the Russians don’t get ‘em and if crime, famine and disease don’t get ‘em, then WE’LL have to later on”9. He is even able to blithely consider the nuclear annihilation of the population; “If atomic warfare destroyed all human life on earth on earth but two Aryan specimens... we could begin again. I’ve often stated that the conditions... of [US cities] make a positively ATTRACTIVE case for atomic warfare”.10

Being of an essentially petit-bourgeois frame of mind, Mason fetishises bourgeois morality by focusing obsessively on the need to overcome it. This idea runs like a mantra through his writing (basically, “anything is allowed”11), and ties Mason’s ideology neatly to that of the contemporary esoteric-Fascism as practised by Moynihan. The symmetry is expressed in a shared admiration for Anton LaVey and The Church of Satan. Mason’s book reproduces the title page of his copy of LaVey’s Satanic Bible, signed by the author, which he says he acquired in 1969 and “has cherished ever since”.12

Mason strongly approves of LaVey’s rejection of ‘moralism’ in favour of unbridled self-interest (a pseudo-philosophy LaVey defends in turn with a lot of pseudo-science based on Social Darwinism and ‘the survival of the fittest’). While Mason has never been a Satanist (he considers himself an atheist; but then LaVey’s Hollywood Satanism was itself essentially a-theistic) he shares with LaVey a tedious contempt for ‘the masses’ and a philosophy which says it is acceptable to treat them as you like as long as you can get away with it.

Michael Moynihan, of course, was for a while a leading member of the Church of Satan before aligning himself instead with racist Paganism. Despite theological differences, Moynihan and Mason share a common approach which prioritises their (racist) instincts above truth or reality. Their victims are simply worthless, disposable matter. While Moynihan argues in his book on Black Metal that the racist killer is a Beserker channeling the Pagan Divinity woven into the genes of all Aryans, Mason emphasises genetic, animal irrationality directly: “No one has got his feet on the ground if he is not tuned into himself, if he cannot or will not... allow his brain to accept and articulate his animal instincts”.13

In the end, though, this comes down to the same conflation of divinity and animality as in Moynihan; “In talking with people I use terms like ‘Spiritual’ but, more precisely, I mean gut INSTINCT as dictated by millions of years of genetic development... being in abidance with one’s true Gods would also come under this heading. Noble thoughts and ideals. Irrational as Hell”.14 It may be worth noting in passing that it is remarkable how the Fascist mentality, which loves to boast of its ‘spiritual ideals’, actually bases this spirituality on the most banal kind of biological materialism (genetic determinism).

Unable even to begin to grasp the socio-political complexity of the unfolding capitalist system, the occult mind sees everything instead in terms of a rigid dualism in which it pits itself (as unsullied ‘spirit’ / genetic racial purity) against the filthy occult forces of materialism, cosmopolitanism and sedition - aka the Jews who work eternally to pollute and overwhelm the forces of order. In Mason’s formulation, practically everyone beyond a tiny circle of armed Nazi activists is actively or passively helping to sustain a hellish, corrupt ‘Jew System’, and he therefore sees practically everyone as a legitimate target.

Mason increasingly regarded violence against ‘the System’ and everyone involved in it as his summum bonum - so much so that he began to adopt some unusual positions for a Nazi. Not only was he ceasing to care much about who the violence was directed against, he became increasingly catholic about who could legitimately inflict it. For example, while traditional Nazis bemoaned ‘Black Crime’ and ‘Communist Sedition’ in their headlines, Mason welcomed both, arguing that “If a bunch of Black Nationalists rob a Brinks truck, if they kill some System Pigs, WHO CARES??!!.. Any Pig killed by a Black or Communist Revolutionary is one Pig you may be sure will not come after YOU one night with a nice, neat Federal warrant. It’s a dirty, rotten shame that it has to be left up to the likes of Blacks and bow-legged Jewish agitators to hit the Pig System but, damn it, SOMEBODY’S GOT TO DO IT! So wish ‘em lots o’ luck... twenty years of bitter experience has shown that all the piety and all the law and order bullshit of the past has gotten us nowhere”.15

This tactical acceptance of any and all violence against a common enemy (’the System’) is all that lies behind Mason’s talk of having transcended the traditional political division between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ (“classic notions of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’... certainly are by now obsolete and meaningless”).16 This does not make either Mason or Moynihan, who makes similar noises, any less of a Fascist. On the contrary, it manifests the essence of Fascism as an ideology that attempts to unleash an infinity of destruction.

This, however, is all too abstract, dealing as it does with only the general form and structure of Mason’s attitude to violence. In theory, Mason may be an equal opportunity sociopath, but when it comes to the praxis of actual killings and mayhem his clear preference is for the racist murderers who are treated as heroes throughout his book. The clear winner in this regard is Joseph Franklin, another of William Pierce’s neophytes back when he was a member of the NSWPP, who robbed a series of banks and went on a private killing spree in which he murdered as many as 20 people, most of them Jews or Blacks killed at random, though his preferred targets were mixed race couples.

Other racists celebrated in the book include Frank Spisak, the ‘Cleveland University Killer’, a cross-dressing Nazi who in 1982 made attempts on the lives of five ‘racial enemies’, killing three of them (and who later in court blamed his own transvestism on Jews who had ‘taken over his mind’); Michael Pearch, who shot seven Black men at random in Wheaton, Maryland in 1975, killing two of them; and Joseph Christopher, who killed three Blacks at random and wounded at least another four. All of these, and more in the same vein, are held up as people to be admired and, more alarming still, models to be imitated.

After Tommasi’s death the NSLF continued low-key operations for a while and even built local cells in several areas (being well aware that the Nazi movement is riddled with informers and police agents the NSLF adopted a cell structure in which no one knew any members of the group other than the few individuals in their own unit). But after a few years of this, during which time he edited Siege as an NSLF publication, Mason began to develop a new infatuation and new ideas that would eventually gift him his brand identity as a Nazi so extreme that even most Fascists began to consider him untouchable. Typically for Mason his new direction turned around the discovery of another ‘strong’ man he could look up to and adore. This is how he introduces his ultimate hero;

There is a great leader / philosopher in our midst, alive and involved today... with a name and a reputation world renowned and a following of his own.17

He is a product of the American heartland... Personally gifted, selfless, fearless - both morally and physically - and absolutely dedicated to Life, to E.18

Even if you have followed the argument about Mason this far you may still be a little surprised to discover that he is talking here about Charles Manson, leader of the cult responsible for the Tate-La Bianca killings in LA in 1969. Manson, of course, is already something of a counter-cultural success story, being seen by some as the epitome of the romantic outsider; a shaman and magician, beyond Good and Evil - a more condensed and extreme version of a Brian Jones or Jim Morrison, perhaps.

Mason is able to shoehorn Manson into his scheme of things because the latter shared something of the Nazi world-view, also believing that America was headed for an apocalyptic race war. Manson may have been unorthodox in thinking that the Blacks would win this war (though he anticipated that they would soon invite him and his accomplices to take over when they realised they were incapable of running society themselves, the Family having spent the meantime hiding out in a cave in Death Valley waiting for the storm to blow over), but predictably Mason was prepared to cut Charlie some slack and overlook his heterodoxy as long as the core belief in the use of fear and unconstrained violence remained intact - which, in Manson’s case, it certainly was.

Having found his new avatar, in around 1982 Mason split amicably from the remnants of the NSLF in a deal that saw him keep control of Siege as the mouthpiece for his new, pro-Manson organisation, The Universal Order, while Karl Hand retained control of the rest of the NSLF’s assets. For Mason the justification for choosing Charles Manson as the true leader of American Nazism had several components. First, as already mentioned, Manson shared something of the Nazi outlook on race. Second, his actual killings could all be justified even though they didn’t primarily target Blacks: the Manson victims were ‘drug dealers’ and ‘perverts’, etc. (though Mason conspicuously overlooks the fact that so too were the Manson Family). Even the murder of Sharon Tate’s unborn baby was perfectly acceptable as far as Mason is concerned, “it was, after all, a Jew”.19

And finally, Manson’s interest in environmentalism (expressed through his organisation ‘Air, Trees, Water and Animals’ - ATWA), fitted in neatly with the Nazis’ own obsession with cleanliness and ‘the natural life’ (an extension of their mania for ‘purity’). But the key reasons for Mason’s conversion were twofold. First, he believed that Manson embodied a new and higher level of social alienation, which invited a corresponding extremism; “Manson represents the great divide between those persons who imagine there still are choices to be made casually on the basis of Establishment mores and those who have a profound, individual sense of ‘no going back’”.20 In other words, his significance is symbolic: just as Rockwell was a hero for crossing the “threshold of anger” when he adopted the Swastika, Manson in turn represents “the threshold of alienation”,21 and identifying with him means crossing the line that takes you beyond any moral compunction.

The final reason for Mason’s attachment to Manson is particularly interesting. Essentially, he thinks that Manson is hip and appeals to the young, and so can rally people to Fascism in a way that would be impossible for previous Nazi leaders, with their crew cuts and corny shoes (Tomassi aside). And Manson doesn’t have the disadvantage of being associated in the first instance with Nazism. In Mason’s mind (and, I’m prepared to bet, Moynihan’s too) Manson works as a kind of ‘gateway Fascist’ that might draw new layers of (primarily) young people to the cause:

From direct personal experience I tell you that the name of Manson can be used for the same purposes the name of Hitler can be used... MINUS 90% of the usual hassles which immediately follow due to the huge job of conditioning that the Jews have done on people over the last forty or fifty years. Most of you in the Movement have not considered the way Manson is at first taken by average people. Young, wild, American, anti-establishment, and finally, yes, a criminal type but certainly not of the order of what they have whipped up regarding Hitler. Manson scares people but he does so in the way that they LIKE to be scared... After a time, once people have been brought sufficiently around, you may introduce them to Hitler without much risk of losing them.22

Manson symbolises for Mason an ideal combination of distilled amorality and perfected alienation, plus brand recognition among young people looking for nihilistic thrills. His hope is that such people might eventually find in Fascism and racism an ideology that responds to their own sense of social alienation, confirms their narcissistic sense of innate superiority and provides them with obvious targets and easy solutions. In that case, James Mason will have made another recruit.

But what’s in it for Michael Moynihan? Why would he work so hard to put this sort of material in front of the public? The simplest explanation is that he simply agrees with and approves of it: certainly, it concords with most of what we know about his own approach and his stated positions. Just like Mason’ Moynihan is drawn to sensational ‘amorality’, and just like him, he has the lowest possible opinion of most of humanity. Crucially, though, also like Mason, Moynihan is a racist and a Fascist, and he believes that creating a culture accepting of Manson’s nihilism is halfway to making it also amenable to Fascism. The publication of this book seems clearly intended as a contribution to the creation of such a culture.

Stop Press

Spencer Sunshine’s 2024 book, Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism: The Origins and Afterlife of James Mason’s Siege, picks up on reswearch such as that above, but expands it considerably and brings it up to date, paying particular attention to post-industrial counterculture figures, Boyd Rice, Michael Moynihan, Adam Parfrey, and Nikolas Schreck, and their role in promoting Mason and Siege.

A new wave of aspiring neo-Nazi terrorists has arisen—including the infamous Atomwaffen Division. And they have a bible: James Mason’s Siege, which praises terrorism, serial killers, and Charles Manson. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism, based on years of archival work and interviews, documents for the first time the origins of Siege.
First, it shows how Mason’s vision arose from debates by 1970s neo-Nazis who splintered off the American Nazi Party/National Socialist White People’s Party and spun off a terrorist faction. Second, it unveils how four 1980s countercultural figures—musicians Boyd Rice and Michael Moynihan, Feral House publisher Adam Parfrey, and Satanist Nikolas Schreck—discovered, promoted, and published Mason. Neo-Nazi Terrorism and Countercultural Fascism explores a previously overlooked period and unearths the hidden connections between a countercultural clique and violent neo-Nazis—which together have set the template for today’s Neo-nazi terrorist underground.

For religion is nothing but the effect of poetic genius. There is nothing in religion which cannot be found in poetry.
Georges Bataille, ‘William Blake’, Literature and Evil1

Our own Imaginations [are] those Worlds of Eternity in which we shall live for ever in Jesus our Lord.
William Blake, Preface to Milton2

In the end, it is strange that the affinity between Blake and surrealism should be raised so seldom and so indistinctly.
Georges Bataille, The Theology and Madness of William Blake3

We have long argued that Blake was a proto-Surrealist, but critics are confused about how Blake fits into the story of Surrealism and how they received him. The ‘dissenting Surrealist’, critic, philosopher, pornographer, anthropologist and ‘metaphysician of evil’, Georges Bataille adopted Blake as the presiding spirit of his later work, which puts the sacred and religion at the heart of politics. Breaking with the rationalism of Breton and the Hegel-influenced Marxist left alike, on the eve of WWII, Bataille proposes a Surrealist anti-fascism based squarely on myth, fashioned in the image of Blake, which leads him to found the secret society, Acéphale.

On this podcast, Andy Wilson talks to Bataille scholar, Stuart Kendall about the importance of Blake to Bataille, the reception of Blake by the Surrealists generally, anticlericalism as a barrier to the Surrealists’ reception of Blake, and other topics of interest to paid-up Blakeans.

Stuart Kendall

Stuart Kendall is a scholar specialising in Georges Bataille, late modernism, environmental humanities and contemporary culture. He is the author of the book Georges Bataille, in the Critical Lives series from Reaktion Books, as well as translating key works by Bataille.

Topics discussed

Blake and Surrealism | Bataille as librarian and libertine | Bataille’s collaborations | politics, religion, art and literature | a life filled with contradictions | Democratic Communist Circle, La Critique Sociale | Acéphale, College of Sociology | battles with André Breton and Jean-Paul Sartre | influence on Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard, Julia Kristeva | psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, anthropology | Breton and Bataille as the two halves of Surrealism | Cabaret Voltaire, Arthur Cravan and militant anti-clericalism: Surrealism’s problem with religion | Why didn’t André Breton love William Blake? | Soupault on Blake and Lautréamont | energy and evil | automatism and Bretonian Surrealism | Surrealism and Communism | Freud, the unconscious, the magical | on the surface of Story of the Eye | translating between Bataille, Breton, Surrealism, and Blake | Alexandre Kojève: for and against Hegel | Surrealism’s enemy within | ‘impossible Surrealism’ | Boris Souverine, Colette Peignot and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell | Marcel Mauss, potlatch economies | The Accursed Share: energy, exuberance, consumption and expenditure | Blake as a companion of thought for Bataille | mobilizing the masses through the use of myth | “Bataille never counted the pennies” | chaos, indeterminacy and over-determination in Blake | “don’t think I don’t know that you’re fucking my wife”: obscentity and truth | contraries, negations and dialectics | Jean Wahl, Kierkegaard and the existential turn against Hegel | Corbynites and the Democratic Left | countercultural fascism and Bataille reception.

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Laure finds Bataille finds Blake

Blake managed, in phrases of a peremptory simplicity, to reduce humanity to poetry and poetry to Evil.
Georges Bataille4

Colette Peignot, known as Laure, had read William Blake in Madrid in April or May of 1936. She moves in with Bataille, and days later, he goes and checks out The Marriage of Heaven and Hell from the Bibliotheque Nationale. I mean, what an act of love that is to me. To me, it’s an utterly beautiful story. But that’s the moment when he is part of Acéphale. You know, it’s as the College of Sociology is being founded. It’s as Bataille is looking for myth and religion as ways to expand his political understanding of community and how it’s formed. And so William Blake and his appeal to the sacred, his appeal to the question of what is God and how does God work in the human imagination.
Stuart Kendall5

If you read Job, there are these powerful subterranean currents of Canaanite mythology to do with the conquering of chaos and Yahweh’s defeat of chaos in order to make a world. And my argument is that Blake lets some of the chaos slip back in. When I was reading you on Bataille’s method, I got the similar sense that the reason he defers, the reason not everything adds up, the reason it isn’t a logical series is precisely in order to prevent the reader arriving at an idealist conclusion too early, or ever.
There are elements to Blake’s method that directly mirror some aspects of Bataille’s, but this isn’t much commented on because people don’t see that aspect of Blake, and it hasn’t been a big feature of Blake commentary.
Andy Wilson6

I think that William Blake became very important to a certain group of philosophers and critics in France in the 1940s. This is the group associated with Bataille, but also expanding beyond him. Blake offers a way of thinking about contraries and opposition that is non-synthetic, that is not purely Hegelian. And there are many other ways to sort of think about this problem, but that debate and that way of thinking about it had other implications important at that time.
Bataille comes to Blake in 1937 at that same moment when he’s looking for alternatives to Marxism. And that’s to say he’s looking for alternatives to Hegelian dialectical thinking. And he’s not alone in that. Now, that problem is one kind of problem when it’s 1937, and your options are Stalin and Hitler. But it becomes a different kind of problem in 1943. And again, in 1946.
When Bataille turns to Blake in the immediate post-war period, that same sort of debate is there. Now, the fascist threat is not there – though, of course, it has now returned. The communist problem is still there. So reading Blake and thinking about the problems of contraries is very important in the immediate post-war period because it’s a way of thinking about philosophy and the philosophies of life, existentialism. It offers a way of thinking about existence and the quest for meaning in human life that is outside the frame of existence.
Stuart Kendall7

Anti-Clericalism

Extremely virulent – and eternally vigilant – anticlericalism is therefore a salient characteristic of surrealist thought. It can be verified on countless occasions in the history of a group that would often be divided by ‘the religious question’.
Patrick Lepetit, The Esoteric Secrets of Surrealism8

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Acephale

We are ferociously religious... what we are starting is a war.
Georges Bataille9

One of the three epigrams to [‘The Sacred Conspiracy’ (1939)] was a passage from Kierkegaard’s notebooks reflecting on the political uprisings in Europe in 1848: “what looks like politics, and imagines itself to be political, will one day unmasked itself as a religious movement.”
Stuart Kendall10

Masson’s drawing for the covers of the journal represents the emblematic figure of the Acéphale, the headless one, who has escaped reason. The figure holds the murderous, sacrificial knife in his left hand and a flaming heart, also symbolizing sacrifice - self-sacrifice - in his right. A skull takes the place of his genitals, identifying sexuality with both birth and death. In his abdomen, as Bataille wrote, “is the labyrinth in which he has lost himself, loses me with him, and in which I discover myself as him, in other words as a monster.” The labyrinth, identified by Masson as ‘our rallying sign’, places the Minotaur myth at the centre of the Acéphale image. Drawings in the third issue of the journal explicitly depict the bull-headed monster of the myth, as well as evoking the early Greek context that so interested Nietzsche and the contributors to Acéphale.
With its clearly delineated muscles, its assertive vertical stance, and the rigidly horizontal alignment of its arms, the Acéphale figure is a Massonian sign of masculine strength, radically altered by the loss of its head and the exposure of its intestines. Reinforced by the placement of the skull at the groin, this threatened status suggests the Nietzschean concept of the unstable self.
Clark Poling11

Appearing in the first issue, Bataille’s text, ‘The Sacred Conspiracy,’ declared the goal of the project: a religious society, in which reason and civilisation are abandoned, and the grandeur of life is sought in ecstasy, with its attendant loss of self. Irrationality, sexuality, and baseness, as aids in overcoming the limitations imposed by society, are central themes in the journal.
Clark Poling12

Acéphale was a secret society that Bataille set up. He did so after he’d been trying to work in probably the most intense way he ever did with the other Surrealists, with Breton, in a group he founded called Counter Attack…
I find it inspiring that the Surrealists took politics seriously, that Surrealism wasn’t just an art movement, but an attempt to change the world. They started by aligning themselves with Bolshevism, Lenin and the Russian Revolution. It is astounding how few of them didn’t get absorbed into that. Some did: Aragon and others became Stalinists; Tristan Tzara did. But I think it amazing that Breton and many of the others stood out against that, became Trotskyists and so on.

Counter Attack was Bataille’s attempt to come up with a way of countering fascism without having any illusions in the Communist Party. It’s obviously a radical position, to the left of the Communist Party. What I mean is that it’s amazing that he could achieve that insight at that time, to see so clearly the limitations of the Communist Party.

The key thing about that is that Bataille’s insight was that fascism was successfully mobilizing the masses through the use of myth. He wanted to counter a different myth. This is very unlike orthodox Marxism, which is rationalist from top to bottom. The idea that we would mobilize myth is something I’ve always believed as an anti-fascist. It’s what the left doesn’t do.
Andy Wilson13

The figure of Acéphale… became their provocative idol, the emblem of their myth… Bataille explained: “originally the image of the Acéphale simply corresponded in my mind to a still ill-defined preoccupation with the ‘leaderless crowd’, and with an existence modelled on a universe that was obviously acephalic, the Universe where God is dead.” Acéphale, in short, represented an attempt to found a religion in a headless universe where God is dead. But this obviously represents a provocative and problematic paradox: what is a religion fit for a universe in which God is dead?
Stuart Kendall14

Story of the Eye

That style that he has in Story of the Eye is something that we could see in somebody like Raymond Roussel. Raymond Roussel, who is not a Surrealist, though celebrated by Surrealists, and of course celebrated by Michel Leiris, who knew him – constructed his books in a similar manner to Story of the Eye. It is language unfolding a thing.
Stuart Kendall15

And what happens – for those who haven’t read it, you’re not going to believe what I’m about to say – but it’s a pornographic story involving an eye, an egg, and all these things are inserted into vaginas and other orifices in many permutations. But the text, as you say, moves at the surface of words and meaning. So the egg and the eye are related because they look similar. Someone pointed this out to Bataille, and this becomes then a principle of how he develops the text. A urine stain in a circle then becomes a third member of this series. The sun is a fourth member.
Andy Wilson16

Bataille’s method in Story of the Eye works across the surface of language and is quite an erotic text, not just in terms of what’s described but in terms of how it functions that things become other things that words become other words uh that it is it’s a book that’s almost impossible to read in translation, at least in the english translation, because the words in French do things to one another and with one another their their proximities suggest the new words.
Bataille’s method in that book – and we should specify that that’s that book is is very much set apart within his oeuvre; he doesn’t use that method very often you know he has written several other or he wrote several other novels or longer prose pieces which work in completely different ways you know some are much more traditional others use symbols in different ways you know they’re complicated at the level of of language and idea and quite extraordinary in terms of the range of experimentalism that we have in Bataille’s prose styles. I marvel at it – but nevertheless, these things stand a bit apart.
Stuart Kendall17

Exuberance and expenditure

In potlatch, consumption is indistinct from the practice of sacrifice, as Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert defined it in their classic treatise on the subject. Sacrifice, as a religious practice, establishes a connection between two separate spheres of experience, the homogeneous profane sphere of everyday life and the heterogeneous sacred sphere of timeless and infinite value, the realm of the gods. In sacrifice an offering is effectively thrown out of everyday life, cast beyond utility into a realm beyond our comprehension. Bataille’s notion of expenditure wilfully conflates sacrificial consumption and raw waste, the high and the low, religion and popular culture. The religious practice of blood sacrifice has, of course, disappeared from modern culture, as have the gods who demanded it. We no longer slaughter the firstborn of our animals or children, nor do we build cathedrals to the glory of our gods. But the structure and the social and psychological necessities of sacrifice have not disappeared, they persist in consumption. Consumption is, in short, a means by which individuals negotiate their identities through expenditure.
Stuart Kendall, Georges Bataille18

Postscript

The crucified Christ is the most sublime of all symbols - even at present.
Nietzsche

William Blake’s… battles between sovereign or rebel deities seem the most obvious object for psychoanalysis. It is easy to perceive the authority of the father and the revolt of the son. It is natural to search in this relationship for an attempt to conciliate opposites, the desire for appeasement lending an ultimate significance to the disorder of war… The problem at hand, in the great symbolic poems, is the struggle of divinities incarnating the functions of the soul and, after the struggle, the moment when each lacerated divinity will find his true and predestined place in the hierarchy of the functions. But such a truth, with so vague a meaning, arises our mistrust. It seems to me that analysis is merely cancelling out a remarkable work and that it is substituting a somnolent heaviness for a weakness.
Georges Bataille, ‘William Blake’19

See a transcript of the podcast discussion

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Further reading

Stuart Kendall at the Blake Society

Recorded 8th Oct 2025. Visit the Blake Society.

This way or no way
You know, I’ll be free
Just like that bluebird
Now ain’t that just like me
David Bowie, Lazarus

Now that I am retired, getting older increasingly feels as if everyone and everything is receding from me. I am far from the first older person to notice this. But as the space clears, things rush in.

Recently, I keep finding myself feeling unbearably sad and guilty about an animal I hurt over half a century ago, kicking a hedgehog in a field one night as a teenager with my equally unpleasant teenage pals across a field in Wyken, Coventry. I’m sorry to say that it is not the worst thing I ever did, but it seems that, in old age, all the unhappiness you've had, all the dubious things you've done, all the people you have hurt, may return to haunt you, compressed into the wounding image of a hedgehog you will never be able to apologise to.

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Thinking about my sacred little hedgehog again today led me to this prayer, from the Liturgy of the Cappadocian Father, founder of Eastern monasticism, St. Basil the Great (329-379 CE), who did not live long enough to retire, but knew what he was talking about anyway:

The Earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. O God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom thou has given the earth as their home in common with us. We remember with shame that in the past we have exercised the high dominion of man with ruthless cruelty, so that the voice of the earth, which should have gone up to Thee in song, has been a groan of travail. May we realise that they live, not for us alone, but for themselves and for Thee, and that they love the sweetness of life.
St. Basil1

Eight years later, in 1982, the Navy expelled me on security grounds (“we are not saying that you are a security risk, but we believe that one day, you might be.” Contrary to any rumours you have heard, they have some observant staff in the RN Special Investigations Branch.) I think it was because I had organised ratings to go to Anti-Nazi League demos, which is technically mutiny, though I don’t know for sure. I was given an ‘honourable discharge’, which means they couldn’t pin anything on me.

Here I am, in the photo, with my class of Air Electronics apprentices, second from the left on top.

The symbols on the board Al and Mike are holding are: A = artificer, 75 = 1975, 3 = third, September, entry of the year, R = radio, radar, etc., engineer.

Of my comrades, Stephen Meadows (top left), from Hull, became an international drug smuggler, running a small fleet of boats going from South America into the US. He was caught, spent years in a Latin American jail, before eventually being returned to the UK to serve out the rest of his sentence. Al Cowling (bottom, second from the left), from Peterborough, taught me how and why to fight racism and homophobia, but died very young of cancer of the spine. Mike Oaksford, from Hatfield (bottom, second from the right), was a fellow political refusenik and was also expelled from the military on security grounds (he sold his car to another matelôt, who found a copy of Mao’s little red book under the passenger seat and ratted him out). He went to do a psychology degree at Durham and ended up as the head of department at Birkbeck, specialising in Bayesian logic, before retiring recently.

The others there were legit, and served out their time (20+ years). Paul Stobie (top, right) was a teddy boy when I knew him (hence the greased DA on his head), but ended up as the Captain of his own RN ship iirc. The rest were (top to bottom, l-r) Tim Watkin, Paul Souter and Jock Douglas.

The Navy taught me many things, though few of them were learned in the many leadership courses and training sessions I did.

In summary: two communists, a teddy boy, an international drugs smuggler and a martyr - not bad for a class of eight.

Later, as a civilian, I go to debate the former head of NATO armed forces, General Sir Anthony Heritage Farrar-Hockley, GBE, KCB, DSO & Bar, MC, on military matters. He was better decorated.

I still don’t salute the flag much.

[Imagination is] that in virtue of which an image occurs in us.
Aristotle, De Anima1

History is essentially poiesis, not imitative poetry, but creation and ontological genesis in and through individuals doing and representing / saying.
Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society2

Back in August 2024, I interviewed Joe Ruffell about the revolutionary career of the Greek / French activist, Cornelius Castoriadis, founder of the workerist group, Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1965), who broke with Marxism in the mid-60s in order to develop a theory of political autonomy which increasingly drew on his insights into the central role of the creativity of the producers under capitalism.

Castoriadis generalised this insight into arguably the most radical theory of the imagination known to either politics or philosophy, though there are traces of it in Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger and others. The radicalism and depth of Castoriadis’s idea of the imagination have long been of interest to us here at The Traveller in the Evening as an analogue of Blake’s similarly radical idea of the imagination, according to which “The eternal body of Man is The Imagination / God himself / that is [Yeshua] Jesus.”3

The overlap and connection between Blake and Castoriadis is suggestive at least, and hints at deeper symmetries. It is the long-term ambition of the Traveller in the Evening to explore these mirrorings and affinities, and to that end, we thought it time to follow up on Joe’s podcast with a follow-up Q&A with Castoriadis scholar, Stephen Hastings-King, author of Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing.

Such an exploration aims to find what support there is in Castoriadis for illuminating how Blake’s imagination is fuel for more than the plastic arts, but underlies the construction of social reality itself, so that a collective Blakean revolution in the imagination would revolutionise society.

Topics discussed: introduction to Castoriadis | the Marxist imaginary | Pattern Recognition Research Collective | Castoriadis vs. fascists and communists in Athens | Zinovievites and syndicalists in the PCI | bureaucratic capitalism or degenerated workers state | Socialisme ou Barbarie formed 1949 | Maurice Brinton, Ken Weller and Solidarity | Castoriadis after Marx | the project of autonomy | wildcatting | 1956 Hungarian uprising | post-Marxism | on the content of socialism | direct democracy | psychoanalysis and the imaginary institution of society | Guy Debord and Jean-Francois Lyotard | democracy and philosophy born together in Greece | Billancourt | interlocked workers councils | auto-nomos | reason and energy, imagination and the instituted imaginary | imagination as the devil | heteronomy as determinism, as Urizen | visions eascape the instituted imaginary | no desire without imagination | magma | society unable to recognise its own auto-institution | the unspoken sets of preconditions that enable desire | hellenophilia, against hellenophilia | Athenian germs | Sparta and Cybele | on Heidegger’s Greek | the so-called Dark Ages | the voice of honest indignation | neither perception nor reason | Wordsworth’s fancy | the unspoken, unformalizable dimension on which formalized things depend | Western philosophy lacks the imagination | relaunching philosophy | aggressively constructing dialogue | autonomy or original sin | human perfection and the Council of Nicaea | church against Galileo | Milton, the light and the dark | the Communist Historians Group, Blake and the Ranters | implosion of the Marxist imaginary | a huge humanizing factor for Western capitalism | diamat dy’in out | competitions for symbolic capital in various academic contexts | the cognitive geography of finance

Stephen Hastings-King’s Castoriadis Reader

The following essays were recommended by Stephen as your shortest way into seeing what Castoriadis said about the main topics discussed in the podcast.

^ Most of Socialisme ou Barbarie esp Modern Capitalism and Revolution

^ Redefining Revolution: Solidarity pamphlet (19pp)

The Imaginary Institution of Society

• Marxism and Revolutionary Theory (158pp)

Crossroads in the Labyrinth Pt1

• Modern Science and Philosophical Interrogation (108pp)

Crossroads in the Labyrinth Pt2: Human Domains

• Discovery of the Imagination (49pp)

• The Greek Polis and the Invention of Democracy (59pp)

• Ontological Import of the History of Science (55pp)

• The Logic of Magmas and the Question of Autonomy (49pp)

Crossroads in the Labyrinth Pt3: World in Fragments

• Power, Politics, Autonomy (42pp)

• State of the Subject Today (54pp)

Crossroads in the Labyrinth Pt4: The Rising Tide of Insignificancy

• The Greek and the Modern Political Imaginary (35pp)

• The Athenian Democracy: False and True Questions (17pp)

• Culture in a Democratic Society (18pp)

• The Ethicists’ New Clothes (49pp)

• Democracy as Procedure and Democracy as Regime (21pp)

Crossroads in the Labyrinth Pt5: Done and to Be Done

• Merleau-Ponty and the Weight of the Ontological Tradition (57pp)

• Imaginary, Imagination, Reflection (78pp)

• Done and to be Done (99pp)

Crossroads in the Labyrinth Pt6: Figures of the Thinkable

• Aeschylean Anthropogony and Sophoclean Self-Creation of Man (34pp)

• Notes on a Few Poetic Means (37pp)

** For news of all things Castoriadis, go to Agora International.

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William Blake’s Wild Imagining

Man is all Imagination
God is Man & exists in us & we in him
William Blake4

Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is The bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.
WIlliam Blake5

This is not the place to discuss Blake’s concept of imagination in detail, except to say that when he describes the imagination as “the body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity,”6 we are being invited to see the imagination as the primum mobile of mind, the unmoved mover, that which is not determined elsewhere within mind. In this conception, the imagination is at the basis of the totality of mind. This is a scandal to rationalising philosophy, which wants the seat of reason to be within reason itself, not in imagination. In Castoriadis, on the other hand, the imagination is at the root of the entire social imaginary. These two positions may amount in practice to the same thing, or something much the same as far as the implications for politics go.

Final Thoughts from Comrade Cardan
Before Closing the Meeting

I think we are at a crossroads in history... One path… leads to the loss of meaning, the repetition of empty forms, conformism, apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism, along with the growing takeover of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited expansion of ‘rational mastery’… and of technoscience racing ahead on its own, and obviously a party to domination by that capitalist imaginary. The other path would have to be opened up; it has not been marked out at all. Only a social and political awakening, a renaissance, a fresh upsurge of the project of individual and collective autonomy… can cut that path. This would require an awakening of imagination and of the creative imaginary.
Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable7

What horrifies… representatives of traditional philosophy… is the necessity of acknowledging the existence of a collective imaginary, and for that matter, of a radical imagination in singular human beings, as a creative force. Creation here means creation ex nihilo, bringing into being a form that was not there before, the creation of new forms of being. It is ontological creation... Why is philosophy, in the forms we have inherited, unable to acknowledge the fact of creation? Because that philosophy is either theological, and therefore reserves creation for God… or it is rationalist or determinist, and therefore obliged either to infer everything that is from first principles... But creation belongs to being in general… and creation belongs, densely and massively, to socio-historical being.
Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable8

Stephen’s Bio

For the past few years, I've been focused on Pattern Recognition: A Research Collective. In that context, I've been using the social imaginary and related notions drawn from Castoriadis (inter alia) to make sense of the pathologies specific to contemporary US finance-capitalism. Financialized higher ed had been our particular focus. We assembled a collection of our writing to serve as a starting point and published it here:

Recognitions

Pattern Recognition Research Collective writes about the social consequences of financialization with special focus on higher education

By Stephen Hastings-King

The piece on the endowment investment strategy known as The Yale Model gives an idea of the work I've been doing. PRRC's publication venue has been silent for a couple years but will be relaunching in September. Neofascism USA in power has inspired us to broaden (and radicalize) what we're doing. The main consultancy page for Pattern Recognition: A Research Collective is here.

My background includes a Ph.D. in Modern European History from Cornell. I have worked extensively on Socialisme ou Barbarie. My book, Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing is available here. My other work can be found via searching the web. I also make short fictions and have been active in experimental music

So if your web search pulls back heterodox-seeming results don't despair.

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Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. They have collaborated with Björk, Laurie Anderson, Jennifer Walshe, Hrafnhildur Arnadottir, Sabrina Scott, Adam McKay, Jeff Bridges, Justin Guariglia, Olafur Eliasson, and Pharrell Williams. Morton co-wrote and appeared in Living in the Future’s Past, a 2018 film about global warming with Jeff Bridges, and is the author of a series of radical works on Ecology, culminating in last year’s Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology.

Andy and Timothy Morton have been talking since Andy interviewed Tim for the Blake Society in March 2024. There was a second interview on the Traveller in the Evening (‘Throwing a Wrench of What the Fuck Into the Machinery’), and a feature review of Tim’s book, Hell: Towards a Christian Ecology (‘Retipped Arrows of Desire: Timothy Morton's Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology’). After that, the conversation really got going.

The discussion took as points of departure, Tim’s ideas about with Object Oriented Ontology (OOO) and hyperobjects, and the Christian ecology he explored so thrillingly in Hell; and Andy’s reading of Blake, in particular Blake’s emphasis on the imagination, and the possible political uses of the imagination, as imagined by the radical post-Marxist, Cornelius Castoriadis. A significant influence arrived with David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies ("an unanswerable and frequently hilarious demolition of the shoddy thinking and historical illiteracy of the so-called New Atheists”), which they read in tandem, emerging on the other side with an expanded sense of how Christianity cuts through contemporary fascism and its war against empathy, which, with careless accuracy, it calls ‘woke’.

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Topics discussed: from Houston to Phoenicia and back | making it up as you go along | Vala, animism, OOO | spending time with the cat while throwing toys out of the pram | deleted every week | going blind vs allowing a structure you haven’t yet thought to endure | solid as a rock | saying lovely things | David Bentley Hart | atheist delusions | Gyrus’s drive North | galvanised by George Floyd | objects from the master-slave regime | the thing called a person starts to get deeper | making Christianity dangerous | the Emperor and the forces of nature | how to live the hyperobject | the kryptonite posture towards hierarchy | the war against empathy | the bomb that went off was Christianity | enthralled by the nation | tea and cake with King Charles and traditionalism | Steve Bannon, Jordan Petersen, Alexander Dugin, and the new pagans | KKK, SPQR, wink wink | reeling from my own torture | the lone and level sands | flies all green and buzzin’ | the bacteria that pooped out oxygen | the hierarchy itself is implacable | the mask comes off | working for the man in Buddhism | Stewart Home’s fascist yoga | falling in love with your guru | all the words are corrupted | the most subversive claim ever made | construct yourself | it’s always going to feel a bit ugly | Bullhead, Nipton and hi-tech nothingness | deliver some string beans | when you put the sugar in the tea | something more general than ideology | the primum mobile of thought | the shark social imaginary | Plato’s cave is what it feels like to be a Platonist | a structure of feeling that hadn't hardened into an ideology | wanting to be cute-sounding | a black opal fire.

We decided it was time to throw some of the ideas we were developing before the public, not in a structured way, but by continuing the discussion in a podcast for the Traveller in the Evening, so we could see for ourselves where we were at. This is that podcast, hopefully the first of a series. Part two will drop when we think we’ve moved on.

The fourth wall between the human subject and everything else evaporates. How to see global warming as part of the human drama, not as the end of it? How to rebuild the play when there is a fourth wall collapse, and when this collapse coincides with the actual theatre on fire? When being on fire is what causes this collapse, what happens? The play was shit. We need another play.
Timothy Morton, Hell

The Christian view of human nature is wise precisely because it is so very extreme: it sees humanity, at once, as an image of the divine, fashioned for infinite love and imperishable glory, and as an almost inexhaustible wellspring of vindictiveness, cupidity, and brutality. Christians, indeed, have a special obligation not to forget how great and how inextinguishable the human proclivity for violence is, or how many victims it has claimed, for they worship a God who does not merely take the part of those victims, but who was himself one of them, murdered by the combined authority and moral prudence of the political, religious, and legal powers of human society.
Which is, incidentally, the most subversive claim ever made in the history of the human race.
David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions

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So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot,
I will spue thee out of my mouth
Revelation 3:16 KJB

I doubt that I have thought about anyone as much as I have thought about William Blake. Today, being the anniversary of his death, I find myself thinking about him some more. It is now fifteen years since I started to sink myself into Blake, after reading him and being overwhelmed… like taking a great lungful of wet sea air after a lifetime breathing wood smoke through a straw.

Blake scholars like to quote him:

I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball
It will lead you in at Heavens gate
Built in Jerusalems wall1

But that is not how he seems to me. Once you can read Blake openly, any page is a portal through which you might momentarily be ejected from Babylon into contact with something more firmly grounded because more overdeterminedly obscure to the tidy mind. Something more like the real. In Blake, everything is everything else: no string-winding is required to get around. How he liked to tease!

The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert. that God spake to them... Isaiah answer'd. I saw no God. nor heard any, in a finite organical perception; but my senses discover'd the infinite in every thing, and as I was then perswaded… that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God... Then I asked: does a firm perswasion that a thing is so, make it so? He replied. All poets believe that it does, & in ages of imagination this firm perswasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm perswasion of any thing.
William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell2

You can’t call Blake’s triumph merely literary or artistic: not because it isn’t that, but because it is more. The work on the page is inseparable from the character of the mid-sized cockney Goliath who engraved, inked and painted it alongside his wife. It is Blake’s character that is his fundamental invention. Blake knew; he knew that he knew, and there was no point combing through the weeds with anyone who thought they knew better. It is this character we need, more than a new hermeneutics for reading his work.

Which brings me to my point: have you met anyone who didn’t like Blake? Someone who knows anything at all about him and doesn’t like the sound of it? Me neither. And there is your problem: Blake is too popular.

That’s right, Blake is too popular. When Blake is popular right across the board, when he means anything you fancy to absolutely everyone, then he means nothing anymore. Somehow, we have made Blake mean nothing.

Blake means nothing because people all find something somehow comforting in him: to the nationalist, he has created the patriotic hymn, Jerusalem; to the academic and journalist, his views can be made easily compatible with your own because no one is checking; to the New Age, Blake is the herald of the artistic imagination, and thus practically a patron Saint. No one has any interest in arguing with anyone else’s views because those views exist as comfort blankets rather than goads. Collectively, we are no longer capable of forming “a firm perswasion of any thing”. Taken in different directions by everyone who these days lays a hand on him, it is Blake’s image, his presence among us, that starts to unravel ‘like a golden thread’.

We need goading. We need people who not only read Blake, but who take him seriously: “Rouze up O Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court, & the University: who would if they could, forever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War.”3

NB. When people try to convince you that William ‘nor shall my sword sleep in my hand’ Blake opposed corporeal war and recommended ‘mental war’ instead, they are telling you that they wouldn’t take sides in a real war or revolution or support one side against the other, or in a physical confrontation with fascism. Contrary to the impression you may have received, they aren’t telling that they actually intend to fight ‘mental war’ instead… they have no such intention. They merely want to maintain the illusory social and intellectual peace that forms the background to their careers.

What do we want?
Mental War!
When do we want it?
Now!

In short: Happy death day, Captain!

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We’re still benefiting from the freedoms that we have because of what Barney Rosset did and because of the battles he fought. They didn’t have a press agent, but they had censorship courtroom battles, which is the same thing.
John Waters

Before producing this collection of artwork and articles from the history of Evergreen Review, Pat Thomas was known to me as the editor of works by Allen Ginsberg (Material Wealth: Mining the Personal Archive of Allen Ginsberg – the London launch party for which I attended), and his collection Listen Whitey! The Sights and Sounds of Black Power, 1965-1975. If, however, you are at all like me – and God help you if you are – you may be more impressed by his association with the amazing San Francisco-based band / music collective, Mushroom. (“a diverse and eclectic blend of jazz, space rock, R&B, electronic, ambient, Krautrock and folk music", it says here). I won’t mention them again here, but you should check them out.

Like Pat’s previous editorial collections, Evergreen Review is lovely to look at (thank Fantagraphics), with full-colour facsimiles of covers and articles throughout. Pat got to choose images and essays from throughout the history of the journal, which started as a player in the literary avant-garde, before pivoting to address the 60s underground in its emergence, focusing on politics and literature through to art and culture.

As 1957-1973 were the years during which the underground was incubated from its roots among the Beats, and grew to its maximum impact before collapsing into the mirror worlds of political activism and New Ageism, a collection of Evergreen Review material offers a chance to take a snapshot of the underground as a whole, seen from the vantage point of the Evergreen offices – which, since those NY offices at various times were within shouting distance of folk seedbed, the Bitter End and Café Wah?, but also Stonewall Inn, the Fillmore East, the Village Vanguard and the offices of the Village Voice, this isn’t a bad place from which to take such a picture. If anything, it may even be too close to events.

The driving force behind Evergreen was its owner and MD, Barney Rosset (1922-2012), the stolen child of an eminent banking dynasty, whisked away at birth by hipster fairies to be transformed into a countercultural changeling. Using family money to buy Grove Press in 1951 while still just about in his twenties, Rosset climbed into the trenches time and time again to defend artists whose work landed them and their publisher in court.

He fought the good fight in defence of free speech, paid the fines and legal fees, and got stuck in generally. Books racked up to the eternal credit of Rosset’s Grove Press in this way include Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. If he’d handled James Joyce’s Ulysses too, Rosset would have had the full set of the era’s celebrated literary free speech defence campaigns and would qualify for immediate sainthood.

In 1957, Rosset launched the Evergreen Review, initially as a regular book-sized collection of essays and articles by favoured authors, a label-taster. The format would change in time to confront the rising counterculture as a magazine-format review of wider scope, as it extended its reach from the literary world into that of the overlapping counterculture.

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Other authors apart from Burroughs et al, published by Grove up to 1961 include: Antonin Artaud, Maurice Blanchot, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Camus, E. M. Cioran, Gregory Corso, E. E. Cummings, René Daumal, Edward Dorn, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Duncan, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Ralph J. Gleason, Clement Greenberg, George Grosz, Eugène Ionesco, LeRoi Jones, Michel Leiris, Federico García Lorca, Robert Lowell, Charles Olson, Boris Pasternak, Kenneth Rexroth, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gary Snyder, Terry Southern, and Alexander Trocchi: a glittering array of Beat, Surrealist, Situationist, Dadaist and related literary outlaws.

An equivalent list for the years after that say something about the shifting of the journal’s center of gravity through to 1968: Georges Bataille, Richard Brautigan, Fidel Castro, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Régis Debray, De Sade, Diane di Prima, Jean Genet, Ralph J. Gleason, Günter Grass, Che Guevara, Nat Hentoff, Chester Himes, Michael Horovitz, John Lahr, Leszek Kolakowsi, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh, W. S. Merwin, Yukio Mishima, Vladimir Nabokov, Octavio Paz, Kim Philby, Hubert Selby Jr., Susan Sontag, Tom Stoppard, Andy Warhol, and Heathcote Williams.

The Counterculture and the New Left

The nature of the relationship between the counterculture and the New Left mutated rapidly throughout the 60s. New struggles swung into view (the civil rights movement, Stonewall, feminism), while old solutions (the Democrats, the Communist Party and the Left) were subject to new criticisms. I’d like to read a study that used the Evergreen back catalogue to take a deep dive into this topic, but that is not what Pat Thomas set out to produce, and there is no criticism implied of the collection we have here.

Expansive New Space for Reflection

Indeed, the question of the evolving relationship between the Left, the literary avant garde and the counterculture practically asks itself when you consider that the first article in the first number of the first series of Evergreen Review is the infamous essay by Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘After Budapest’, in which he takes the Kremlin to task for its suppression of the Hungarian uprising, but then swivels on a quarter to argue that nevertheless, even if one cannot support the official Communists, one can’t oppose them either, since that would be to support fascism. So much for the Hungarians.

The Hungarian revolution was the event that shattered the old far-left consensus, causing a mass exodus from Communist Parties across the West. More than a one-off political crisis, or ‘a little local difficulty’, it represented the tearing of a gaping hole in the collective reality-field of the Left. As Stephen Hastings King put it, “the cultural and political impact of the Soviet crushing of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, [was] a moment of maximal internal dissonance for the Left’s main image of the USSR... The result was the gradual emergence of an expansive new space for reflection.”1

One could ask what use the Evergreen Review made of this new space. In some ways, the initial response, penned by Satre, set the tone, with its equivocations and evasions. Of course, one should ask exactly the same question of the entire Left and counterculture of that era, since their historical task was to make the best use possible of this rupture. Not that many would have done noticeably better. How could one align with the New Left and new struggles against oppression, yet criticise them at the same time?

Some of the issues the question raises are quite sticky. Some are obvious. It is fair to ask what to make of the copyrighted and instantly recognisable portrait of Che, which famously decorated a thousand student dorms. What was the effect of turning Che into a brand, based on an image created on commission for Evergreen Review? As an icon, he was arguably above anything more than tactical criticism.

More thorny, perhaps, is the question of how far one can support women’s liberation while pandering to women’s oppression. The Review typically and characteristically hosted articles calling for more women authors to be published in the magazine, calling out its own editorial practice, without being overly concerned with the fact that Rosset also made money by financing the production and distribution of soft porn, or that his personal preference for covers he chose for the Review were in the realm of what Pat in his introduction coyly calls ‘T&A’: tits and ass. The ability of staff to do anything about this was surely hampered by Rosset’s determination to keep Grove Press and the Review union-free.

I asked a question at the launch of the book about how successfully Rosset et al navigated these issues, how they played out in the Review over the years, and I received the perfectly respectable response that, over hundreds of issues, with thousands of images and articles, it is a complicated subject. It certainly is, and I shan’t dwell on it further except to say that,

• reading between the lines

• accepting that this collection is only a skim across a vast archive, and

• noting that the selection criteria didn’t involve a political filter

You nevertheless see the story play out for yourself.

You are hard and proud, my friend,
Not soft and long like the tongue,
Together we have share all kinds of bitterness and sweetness,
But now you must go west while I go east.
Ho Chi Minh, ‘Goodbye to a Tooth’, Prison Poems (1942)

fish smell and dead eyes water reeds scarred metal faces
running into the mines liquid typewriter
flickered on field where flesh circulates. red fish talk falling.
William Burroughs, ‘Dead Whistle Stop’, Floating Bear (1962)

Between these two poems lies a world of difference.

One has to ask by what possible literary criterion Ho Chi Minh’s Prison Poems were chosen for publication. If they were published as an act of solidarity with the Vietnamese people, I can sympathise. But why anyone would want to read them outside of morbid curiosity is impossible to say. As poems, they suck.

Lucky Bag

There are too many pieces here to be able to do justice to them all, but special mention should go to the Review’s publishing of Brion Gysin’s ‘Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success’, since, along with Burrough’s better known explications of the same ideas, such text’s created a key framework for literary Surrealism diown to today.

Writing is fifty years behind painting. I propose to apply the painters' techniques to writing; things as simple and immediate as collage or montage. Cut right through the pages of any book or newsprint... lengthwise, for example, and shuffle the columns of text. Put them together at hazard and read the newly constituted message. Do it for yourself. Use any system which suggests itself to you. Take your own words or the words said to be "the very own words" of anyone else living or dead. You'll soon see that words don't belong to anyone.
Words have a vitality of their own and you or anybody can make them gush into action. The permutated poems set the words spinning off on their own; echoing out as the words of a potent phrase are permutated into an expanding ripple of meanings which they did not seem to be capable of when they were struck and then stuck into that phrase.
Brion Gysin2

My favourite bribe as a child was the lucky bag, and this collection of work from the Review ticks many boxes in the same way. There are explanatory and contextual essays by Pat Thomas, Lauren Glass, John Oakes, Cassia Body, Ethan Persof, and Dale Peck; interviews by Pat with key players and commentators Stanley Gontarsky, Claudia Menza and Ken Jordan; and facsimiles of original essays from the Review by Brion Gysin (on Cut-ups, but also an interview alongside Burroughs on ‘The Boston trial of Naked Lunch’), Timothy Leary (‘A Magical Mystery Tour’), Jerry Rubin (‘A Yippie Manifesto’), Daniel Odier (‘Journey Through Time-Space: An Interview With William S Burroughs’), Nat Hentoff (‘Captain America’s Restaurant’), Abbie Hoffman (‘Thorns of the Flower Children’), Bobby Seale (‘The Double Standard of Justice’), Allen Ginsberg (‘Memory Gardens’), and much more besides.

How you could be interested in this blog and not interested in this collection is not clear to me, so preorder a copy if you can afford it (c. £26 large hbk, full colour).

Preorder

• Amazon

• Turnaround Publishers (UK)

• Fantagraphics (US)

NB. All images from the Evergreen Review are copyright of Pat Thomas and the Evergreen Review.

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Mark Vernon, (2025), Awake! William Blake and the Power of the Imagination, London: C Hurst & Co., 368pp.

Podcast Notes: Awake!.. but no ‘Woke’!

The stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero, which all men ought to contemn, are set up by artifice against the Sublime of the Bible... We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own Imaginations...
William Blake1

Thou readst black where I read white.
William Blake2

The comfy chair is the torture.
Timothy Morton

Methodological Preamble

The podcast discussion with Mark was hard to edit from almost two hours of recordings, as there were many spontaneous interruptions, often unfruitful, for reasons I try to address here. What remains is a podcast capturing a general introduction to the book from the author’s point of view and the gist of the argument between us, with digressions removed and gaps cauterised as best I could.

It was not the discussion Mark had anticipated, though I had no way of knowing my approach would surprise him so (the orientation of this site being public, and since he and I had talked previously). I’d hoped to tease out some of the controversial aspects of his reading of Blake, but my questions were not allowed to land, being shrugged off as irrelevant, misinformed, or senseless to his way of thinking. As an old friend of mine used to say, it felt like throwing slices of hot toast into a cooling fridge.

My normal practice when interviewing someone about their book is to keep it apart from the written review, if for no other reason than that they are created separately and make sense in their own right, so there’s no advantage in having to prepare both for publication before sharing them. In this case, I’m merging the two, hoping my review notes help people make sense of the difficulties in the interview. What follows tries to tie arguments in the podcast discussion to points I would have made in a review. Without this, the podcast would sound like two people talking past each other, without any explanation of why. But first of all, I had to work out this ‘why’ for myself.

Traditionalist / Neoplatonist Contentions

The initial point of contention involved Mark’s consistently Traditionalist / Neoplatonist approach to Blake, and the political implications of what he says in his book against equality and ‘woke’ politics as a consequence. To be fair, Mark is against being against equality in the same sense that he is against being for equality, so he might not like my saying that his book speaks against it.

I invited him to clarify how he understood these ideas, given that the reactionary current of Traditionalism established by René Guénon is far the best known to a lay readership (certainly among my anti-fascist friends and followers of this blog), and influential in the form of MAGA activist and Trump advisor, Steve Bannon; advisors to former Brazilian President and Trump ally, Jair Bolsonaro; the Russian ‘neo-Eurasian’, Aleksandr Dugin; Gábor Vona, founder of the far-right Hungarian Jobbik Party, and similar figures in today’s rightist politics; and Jordan Peterson, the social media inspiration for a generation of incels and toxic young men. All of these people, as Traditionalists, reject the idea of equality, and reject what they call ‘woke politics’.

Against Equality, Against ‘Woke’

On equality, Mark echoes the broad Traditionalist position, not only rejecting it in principle, or a least denying it on Blake’s behalf, but rejecting it in favour of “a wise culture in which individuals were guided by a yearning for the infinite” (ie., sacred society), saying:

… thinkers like Thomas Paine, Joseph Priestly, Benjamin Franklin and William Godwin agitated for equality and that is not a concept in the Blakean canon. For him, equality has flattening, secular overtones;3 Blake did not primarily seek a meritocracy of citizens… but more profoundly hoped for a wise culture in which individuals were guided by a yearning for the infinite.4

He quotes Blake speaking against hypocritical moralism, “The Moral Virtues are continual Accusers of Sin & promote Eternal Wars & Domineering over others,”5 then equates such religiose posturing and resentment directly with “the trend named woke”, saying that “when people seek to feel self-righteous, intolerance and hypocrisy inevitably follow,” as if the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and their supporters are acting essentially out of self-righteousness and intolerance. He says “the risk is that token groups, deemed beyond the pale, are adopted as substitutes for the fault lines that, in truth, run through everyone.”6 The victim of racism who calls out their oppressor is wrong to see the problem as lying with the racist. Instead, the problem must “run through everyone”, racist and antiracist alike. This is not the voice of someone who has been a slave.

Mark seemed alarmed to be compared to the reactionaries (as he saw it), but not inclined to separate himself from them intellectually (other than saying that Guenon’s problem was that, like the reformers, he focused on what he opposed), as that would be to descend into politics in the course of criticising them. This position made any engagement between our different ideas of Blake impossible.

The problem with this attempt to wish away political antagonism is that it only makes sense within this particular understanding of Neoplatonism, and amounts to saying that this mode of thought can’t be criticised politically. Mark felt I was tarring him unjustly by comparing him with the likes of Bannon, Guénon, Frithjof Schuon and the Italian ‘super-fascist’, Julius Evola, but at the same time, he wouldn’t explain the difference when it came to the matters I raised (equality, ‘woke’ politics).

Tradition as Such

Mark’s interpretation of the tradition he is channelling is narrow, in the sense of resting on precise readings of Plato, Plotinus, Proclus, Eurigena, Origen, Pseudo-Dionysus the Areopagite, and other key figures in Neoplatonic and Church history. He takes his preferred reading of Neoplatonism as holding for the tradition as such. This made it almost impossible to talk about the real-world effect of Neoplatonism on Christian theology, as any evidence adduced from this or that Neoplatonist could instantly be dismissed as the work of someone who didn’t understand Neoplatonism in its true sense.

The closest to this in my experience is those Marxists who treat almost everything done in the name of Marx since his passing as not reflecting ‘true Marxism’, which they alone, after much study, have grasped, and which is impenetrable to criticism. They cannot defend the ideas they support in terms of their impact, how they were manifested in history, but only in terms of a closed system of ideas which explains all criticism away.

I admit my pride was stung by Mark’s continual rejection of my questions, and his claims that my reading of Neoplatonism was simply stereotyped, outdated, or ignorant of the latest research, and all I needed to do was “read Plato and Plotinus.” Perhaps I was too subtle at times. Mark seemed to take my observation, lifted from Northrop Frye via E.P. Thompson, that “Blake is like a picnic to which he brings the words and we bring the meaning,” with the rider that “I bring my meaning, Mark brings his”, to be a recommendation rather than an ironic commentary on the nature of commentary itself. He felt obliged to chide me by pointing out that “Blake is not a tabula rasa that you can just read any old meaning onto.”7 Perhaps at times I could have spoken more clearly for his benefit.

So, our talk went in circles, with Mark protesting my questions, insisting that his work could only be discussed fairly on its own terms, which would make a critical review impossible. I realised some time after finishing the recording that Mark’s response is not just ideological but also reflects the mood of the contemporary Blakeosphere, which studiously avoids conflict and controversy. One consequence is that no one asks questions unless they are likely to be flattering to the author. “The voice of honest indignation is the voice of God,” but you are unlikely to overhear it among Blakeans these days.8

Traditionalism Against the Modern World

Ironically, Traditionalism is a modern response of modernity to itself (“Originating in the thought of René Guénon in the 20th century”),9 just as Jihadist Islam, similarly assumed to be deeply rooted in tradition, is actually another such characteristic product of modernity. There would be no point to Traditionalist philosophy in anything other than modern society, of which it is a negative image: modernity standing on its head.

In this view, the evils of the world are concentrated in modernity (and not, say, pre-modern societies, whatever their shortcomings, which anyway tend to be seen as aspects of modernity developing in the womb of earlier societies), and can only be redeemed by returning to the kind of traditional societies which preceeded it. Those same traditional societies are characterised by Moderns as ages of unchecked power exercised arbitrarily in support of ignorance and superstition, which have now been, or are now being, overcome.

This (need I say it, utterly mistaken) perspective of the Enlightenment is turned 180° around by Traditionalists, for whom the modern world is a soulless mill for grinding spirit to dust, a mistaken turn on the forked paths of history from which we should retreat; just as, for the moderns, traditional societies represent the savage and ignorant childhood of humanity which we must outgrow.

Traditionalists believe in universal truths expressed in all the major religions, handed down through time to form a sacred order that modernity has eclipsed and dissolved. Traditionalists call for reestablishing that sacred order in place of Liberal Democracy, which is reviled for its commitment to what is seen as an illusory equality among its citizens.

Getting Our Heads Straight

Mark repeatedly emphasised his opposition to any politics that focused on what it was against rather than what it was for. I took that to mean that he did not share the politics of reactionary Traditionalism (which is ‘against the modern world’ in practice, with its political program of opposition to democracy), but looked forward to living in a post-liberal world that would arise somehow if we all ‘got our heads straight and sorted our shit out’, as they used to say.

As Mark seems closely aligned with the Traditionalism of Kathleen Raine and the Temenos Academy10 (which combines teaching the essentials of Traditionalism with the careful apoliticism of an educational charity that has the former Prince Charles – for whom Raine was a ‘mentor’ and ‘spiritual director’ – as a patron and supporter),11 at first, I thought he was simply offended at being mentioned in the same breath as Traditionalist fascists, not understanding that I was inviting him precisely to separate himself from them in the public imagination by explaining the difference between his views and theirs – something he doesn’t do in the book. This proved impossible due to Mark’s rejection of the very language of politics or social reform. He would find it a problem even to describe someone as a fascist, for fear of pigeonholing them.

Non-Destructive Antagonisms and the Peace of the Grave

His view seemed to be that discussing politics in a partisan manner is a trap, since politics can only reproduce the antagonisms it wants to overcome because of its negative, critical character – protesting injustice creates fanaticism, which makes things worse: in Blake's terms, as Mark uses them, fighting fascism would be an attempt to destructively ‘negate’ it, whereas we should instead be seeking a productive dialectic with it as a non-antagonistic ’contrary’ to our own views.12 What that would look like remains a mystery: I don’t know if it would involve meditation classes and reading Blake with Tommy Robinson.

It is remarkable how much this has in common with a philosopher normally positioned as the very antithesis of the otherworldliness of Platonism, namely Nietzsche, with his view of existence as merely the arena for the exercise of the Will to Power. Nietzsche, of course, celebrated this nihilism as a great liberation from Christian ressentiment and ‘slave morality’. In his prissy philologist’s way, he revelled in the ἀγών, the ‘agon’ (conflict, strife), every bit as much as Mark is repulsed by it.

Nevertheless, Mark shares the Nietzschean view, eg., of fascists and anti-fascists as symmetrical wills at war. The difference is that he regrets the energy wasted in such struggles and recommends elevating oneself above them by exercising imagination and vision. But as an anthropologist, he’s a Nietzschean. Platonism overlaps strangely with Nietzsche since it sees us trapped in the cave of purposeless matter and its conflicting wills:

I was thinking about what David Bentley Hart says about the depressive gloom of the pagan world. The way one ‘lives’ a Platonic view is that one lives in a sordid, tawdry prison. The allegory of the cave is exactly what it says it is: a description of being a Platonist. Visions of the emerald beyond - but you can’t see that it is emerald, even as it’s reflection flickers on the walls.
Timothy Morton13

With the wind in the right direction, a criticism of right-wing Traditionalism is just about implied by Mark’s apolitical stance, since they engage in politics, just as do the Moderns (and then some – look at Bannon). However, any criticism remains muted in practice: the only partisan politics criticised systematically in his book are those of reformers and revolutionaries such as Tom Paine and George Washington, and Vernon reads Blake’s prophetic works about the French and American revolutions, America: A Prophesy (1793) and Europe: A Prophesy (1794), as warnings against the ‘Satanic’ fanaticism of reformers and revolutionaries. This is not a personal prejudice on his part, but because these reform movements are rooted in the Enlightenment attack on the ancien regime, on tradition.

The criticism of progressive politics plays out partly through criticism of the character of Orc, traditionally interpreted in Blake’s mythology as an avatar of revolutionary energy. For S Foster Damon, “Orc is the spirit of passionate Revolt. He was born from the heart, and his name is actually an anagram of Cor, or 'heart'.”14 Against this, the author sees only the worst in him:

… those who feel abused by the powerful… are vulnerable to those with a saviour complex – as the young woman is to Orc.15

In one particularly dramatic depiction of Orc, the young Eternal, whom some scholars argue looks like Paine, is shown immersed in a wall of fire, arms outstretched. He blazes with the spirit of right. Blake has been called a master artist of flames and this is why. ‘What the hand dare seize the fire?’, he had asked in his poem, The Tyger. The foolish hand, it might be thought.16

What Mark fails to register is that the flaming, energetic, unreasonable and obsessive side of Orc only exists here in the perception of the King, the ‘Angel of Albion’, who represents Urizen:

To the Angel of Albion, Orc is a Demon. Blake has reverted to the paradox of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that the Angels are all Stand-patters, and the Devils the original thinkers. Orc is a demon of this Hell. He is lawless and impulsive: therefore his flames show heat (passion) but not light (reason), since he is fighting against Urizen.17

Mark adopts the King’s point of view as his own.

As I say, all politics is condemned in theory by Mark, presumably including both sides in the French and American revolutionary wars: it’s just that it is almost always the cause of anti-colonialism, ‘woke’ politics, revolution and social reform that take the flak, since the target of Traditionalist critique is the modern sensibility underscoring these ‘Enlightened’ movements, based on their mistaken views about equality, as traditionalists see it.

A generous critic might argue that Mark takes for granted the critique of tyranny, slavery, etc. But a book about Blake cannot afford to take such issues for granted, or pass over them lightly, as they are things that shook him to the core and inspired some of his deepest responses to the world. Blake did not ‘rise above’ such concerns to live instead in the empyrean. A book about Blake which does not engage positively with these issues is not a book about Blake, but a book about something else.

Paganism or Zion: What is Neoplatonism?

Traditionalism has its roots in Neoplatonism. Both emphasise transcendent values and the importance of tradition in creating a polity. Traditionalism leans on Neoplatonism to ground its worldview in those supposedly universal truths believed to be accessible through tradition. Full-throttled (Neoplatonic) pagan polytheism returns today as the toothless (Traditionalist) Perennialism.

Neoplatonism emerged in the period of Hellenistic syncretism in the early centuries CE, which also created currents such as Hermeticism and Gnosticism, often existing at the boundary where Greek philosophy and cosmology collided with Christian faith. The Gnostic belief that we are trapped in a world of dead matter created by a Divine impostor, and that we must escape into the world of pure spirit through gnosis/vision, mirrors Neoplatonic belief in the complete transcendence of God (‘The One’) and its denigration of matter, which is reckoned to be a senseless, formless chaos before it is stamped with form and intelligence by spirit: spirit good, matter bad.

Such ideas were attractive to later generations of Christian converts, increasingly drawn from the educated classes rather than the largely illiterate peasantry that brought Christ’s message into the world. Illiterate or not, the very first Christians did not often have Socratic dialectics much on their minds. These later, educated Christians, on the other hand, naturally drew on the sophisticated philosophical conceptual armoury of their culture to justify their newfound faith to their similarly educated pagan neighbours.

While Neoplatonic ideas were thus imported into and absorbed by the Church, even becoming foundational for much subsequent Christian theology, it is wise to remember that Neoplatonism existed in its own right, independently of Christianity, not only as a philosophical school but complete with a theurgy and ritual practice. When Julian the Apostate (331-363 CE), nephew of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine, famously abandoned Christianity on becoming Emperor himself, he did so in the name of Neoplatonism and a return to traditional pagan polytheism. For Julian, the Christians were the damned moderns.

Mystic Eyes: Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite

The story of Genesis, translated into Koine Greek as part of the Septuagint, was a major influence in shaping Neoplatonism as it developed within the Platonic tradition. Fusing the Biblical story of Creation with characteristically Platonic ideas about how ‘The One’ begets the things of this world, produced a tradition of cosmological speculation that peaked with Plotinus (204-270 CE) in the Enneads.18 This is where Neoplatonism really takes off.19

The real fusion of Christian and Neoplatonic thought comes later at the hands of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, writing pseudoepigraphically in the late 5ᵗʰ - early 6ᵗʰ Centuries CE, more than two centuries after Plotinus (though it would be another few centuries still before his work started to seriously impact the Latin Church).20 It is in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, especially his Celestial Hierarchy (“a book much sweated over by people of a curious or superstitious temperament,” according to Martin Luther, who otherwise seemed quietly keen on the author)21 that the concept of apophatic knowledge first appears, by which Pseudo-Dionysius means knowing what cannot be known regarding God, and building a theology based on this not-knowing, a protean Negative Dialectics. This is a vital idea in the history and development of mysticism, with its Cloud of Unknowing, in both Eastern and Western Christian traditions, but we must leave it behind for now to focus on the other key part of Pseudo-Dionysius’s thought.

Pseudo-Dionysius also developed a systematic account of the Divine emanation, which he called the hierarchy, thus coining the term. The paradox he wrestled with was that of relating an unknowable and infinite God to human beings of limited sense and understanding. His solution was a hierarchy stretching from God at the pinnacle of creation, down through successive layers of angels, each of which dilutes the Divine light flowing from above, making it potentially intelligible to the next layer down the hierarchy, all the way down. Conceptually, the divine power is centralised and emanates hierarchically from its centre/peak, with each step considered a falling away from the elevated excellence above.

In Pseudo-Dionysius’s model, there were nine levels of angels beneath God in the hierarchy (Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels). This model passed into many subsequent hierarchies of angels, including that of Thomas Aquinas.

Snakes and Ladders on the Cosmic Org Chart

This angelic hierarchy became the model for an earthly equivalent, with the rulers of the Church in their various roles seen as reflecting the higher orders down here on Earth. This projection of the angelic hierarchy was not merely an inference by the readers of Pseudo-DIonysius, but the topic of his major work, On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, where he “describes the human beings within the church as divided into eight ranks: the hierarchs or bishops, priests, deacons, monks, laity, catechumens, penitents, and the demon-possessed.”)22 While this Earthly arrangement reflects the celestial hierarchy, it is nevertheless situated beneath it, such that the hierarchs at the top of the ecclesiastical structure are positioned just beneath the angels on the bottom rung of its celestial template.

‘Hierarchy’ is from the Greek hierarkhia, ‘rule of a high priest’, from hierarkhēs, ‘high priest, leader of sacred rites’. Note that the entire cosmic plan is named after this earthly manifestation of good order (hierarkhia). This seals the notion that the abstract hierarchy is embedded in actual power over the souls of men. In the modern world, this conception survives as the company Org Chart, with the CEO at the pinnacle, and a pyramid of successive layers of management down to the mass of office juniors.

Stirring the Word-Soup

When I asked Mark about the hierarchical nature of the Neoplatonist ‘hierarchy’, he shrugged it off, as Neoplatonists do:

When you read the Celestial Hierarchies… what he's describing there is not a hierarchy that separates… all these levels that he describes are distinct but not different. And so all these levels… are actually mediating levels… and all levels are present in every other.23

This exemplifies the problem I had with our discussion: I ask about the hierarchical implications of the original Neoplatonic hierarchy, Mark replies with a rote answer that wishes the problem away by defining hierarchy as something which doesn’t divide but unites (“all levels are present in every other”). But this is just a reflexive stirring of the word-soup, with no bearing on how ideas reflect and interact with the world. No doubt the author sincerely believes that such formulations square the circle intellectually, but anyway, it is a purely intellectual solution. If you think ideas exist as pure forms, you can arrange them any way to suit your purpose without remainder: you are never wrong.

Pseudo-Dionysius himself spoke of descending through the hierarchy in terms which already imply highly valorised differences between its levels, one being more or less desirable than another. In his On Mystical Theology, we read:

In the earlier books my argument traveled downward from the most exalted to the humblest categories.24

The Catholic Encyclopedia comments on the system of The Celestial Hierarchy:

Quite characteristic is the dominant idea that the different choirs of angels are less intense in their love and knowledge of God the farther they are removed from him, just as a ray of light or of heat grows weaker the farther it travels from its source. To this must be added another fundamental idea peculiar to the Pseudo-Areopagite, namely, that the highest choirs transmit the light received from the Divine Source only to the intermediate choirs, and these in turn transmit it to the lowest.25

How can it be that “all levels are present in any other” when neighbouring levels are only partly comprehensible to their peers, and more distant layers cannot ordinarily be contacted at all except through intermediaries (supernatural intervention aside)? If all levels are present in every other, there would be no need for Pseudo-Dionysius to ‘travel downward’ through them.

Any working hierarchy must inevitably unite its parts, or else commands / inspiration / the divine effulgence couldn’t propagate through it effectively. Equally obviously, while the CEO and the office cleaner are always conceived to be on the same side, especially in morale-boosting emails to the team at Christmas, they are not only distinct but actually in diametrical opposition in some regards, even if everyone is honour-bound to deny it. One might deny this speculatively, but reality will out.

Merging Hierarchy Into Unity by Fiat

Beyond criticising the idealism of a slippery dialectic that can compress hierarchy into unity by fiat (since it is an example of the churning of Satan’s mill, spewing out ratios and equivalences to order), it also helps to look at the context in which these ideas were set loose, which is that of the emergence of the modern state. Across Europe, local warlords were building their emerging feudal hierarchies of control and obeisance on a hierarchical model.

These developments shaped Church theology much as Church architecture was shaped by existing Roman and Greek architecture (the new Church Basilicas being based on Roman courthouses, for example). It is impossible to imagine a philosophy not somehow reflecting the world in which it develops, and neither would it be very useful to have one. As David Bentley Hart notes, the process of mutual influence is so intricate that it is impossible to say whether the promulgation of ideas of Ecclesiastical hierarchy shaped the new political structures any more than the new politics inspired an ecclesiastical fondness for hierarchy before projecting it onto the cosmos:

[In] early modern Christian systematics, Protestant and Catholic alike [is] a shared insistence upon the centrality of the sovereignty—that is, the sublime arbitrariness—of grace, and of the purely extrinsic relation between nature and ‘supernature’. This leaves open to debate the degree to which the early modern politics of absolute monarchy and the early modern theology of pure divine sovereignty reflected or generated one another.26

None of this is to say that Pseudo-Dionysius set out to create an intellectual support for worldly hierarchy. The resonance between his ideas and their setting exists regardless of his intentions or the intentions of his spiritual heirs. A similar caveat applies to many aspects of Awake! While its stance is thoroughly Traditionalist and Neoplatonic, in both the book itself and in our discussion, the author sincerely tries to make it fit with the views of Blake.

For instance, while I say that the Neoplatonists ultimately denigrate matter, Mark nevertheless speaks of Blake’s “very, very Christian… idea that we're in the world, thoroughly in the world,” which sounds appropriately ‘this-sided’ for Blake. But he immediately follows up by saying “We're human and mortal, but we're not of the world.”27 Now, there are a number of ways to define the idea of ‘a world’ here, and at least one of them would mean that it would be true to say that we are “not of the world”. Mark’s specific idea seems to be that not only are we not of this world, but our only hope is put the troubles of this world behind us in favour of insight and vision. One exists at the expense of the other, hence we can speak of the denigration of this world even while it appears to be celebrated.

Neoplatonism and Hierarchy in Practice: The Mandate of Heaven

If you believe that hierarchy unites as much as it divides, then the obvious focal point of your unity will be at the apex, which perhaps explains Mark’s extremely un-Blakean enthusiasm for the monarchy, and for King Charles in particular. On Charles, he says “His views do not matter. They are a distraction because there is something greater, more long-lasting at work in his soul.” He describes Charles as “one of a handful of individuals who have understood Blake,” as he was mentored by Temenos founder, Raine.28

Coronation Cream

The topic of King Charles’s coronation allows Mark to throw off the mask of apoliticism, writing an article entitled, ‘The Esoteric is Political, Thoughts on the Coronation’, which opens with a surprisingly revealing sexual metaphor, asking:

Did the earth move for you? This is a crucial question for we Brits in the glowing, or is it glowering, aftermath of the coronation. You see, the thing about rich symbols and elaborate rituals is not whether you believe in them or understand them... If the expansive, inclusive rite of the King’s crowning even momentarily stirred your heart or held your gaze, then it worked its magic and did its job... The earth moved for me.

Nationalism (“we Brits”) and the monarchy inspire a visceral response in Mark, which leads him to reveal his politics – except that, within the world of Traditionalism, nationalism and divinely appointed rulers are not considered political in the contemporary sense. They are not considered controversial, but timeless elements of Tradition. Hence, Mark can combine a studious apoliticism in theory with such a highly charged, borderline-libidinous response to the sight of the Coronation

In his excitement, he even admits that ‘the esoteric is political’, as well as expressing the Traditionalist faith in the efficacy of ritual, “whether you believe in them or understand them.” The masses do not need to understand the rituals they engage in, they only need to sense the ‘mystery’. It is for the Brahmin class to understand the symbolism and administer the rites.

All this flows directly from what the scholar of Traditionalism, Mark Sedgwick, describes as Guénon’s political ideal of “a partnership between spiritual authority, which conserves and transmits knowledge (the tradition), and temporal power, which acts on knowledge ánd maintains order. This, wrote Guénon, is what is meant by what the Chinese called 'the mandate of heaven', and is expressed in another form by the idea of the divine right of kings', and visible in the way that kings are anointed by the clergy at their coronations.”29

The Pained Root of Mystery

Is it necessary to point out that Blake is somewhat less impressed by religious mystery and obscurantism than Mark?

For when Urizen shrunk away
From Eternals, he sat on a rock
Barren; a rock which himself
From redounding fancies had petrified
Many tears fell on the rock,
Many sparks of vegetation;
Soon shot the pained root
Of Mystery, under his heel:
It grew a thick tree30

Much has been made of Charles’s ambition to be seen, not as the usual ‘defender of the faith’ (where this is very specifically meant to be the Anglican faith), but ‘defender of all faiths’. This is typically felt to express his ambition to “reflect UK’s religious diversity”,31 which it may well be. But note too that, as a student of the traditionalist Kathleen Raine, this would also reflect the Traditionalist belief that all religions express the same underlying perennial truths, which Charles would bring under his wing. For Charles, it’s a promotion.

Zadok and Nathan

In relation to the Coronation, Mark sees only the mystery and drama of the ritual. Martyn Percy, on the other hand, in his book on the legacy of Empire and slavery in the Church of England, saw plainly the vestiges of Colonialism and, yes, its hierarchies. I quote him at length as he grasps the essence of the problem with the ritual:

This was a moment crying out for authenticity, integrity, and disinvestment in patrimony. It could have been a genuine opportunity for change. But it wasn't to be... The music was beautiful and in places was spine tingling. Slow-paced stately grandeur is an aesthetic, but also a kind of politics. The appearance of progress – on the day and over time – comes through small but welcome advances. But appearances are all it is.32
Handel’s haunting Zadok the Priest would have given even the most hardened atheist goosebumps. Yet we forget that the anointing of Solomon (I Kings 1) was conducted by both Zadok and Nathan the prophet. The act of making a king for Israel was performed by a hereditary priest and a non-hereditary prophet. Yet the coronation liturgy has almost eliminated the role of the prophetic. This leaves us with a ritual celebrating theocratic power, but without its necessary prophetic challenge.33

My point is that, whichever account you accept, the critical Martyn Percy or the enthusiastic Mark Vernon, the implications are far from apolitical, and the matter cannot simply be ducked. The service advertised a Church and Monarch tied up with the legacy of Empire, led by a Church grown fat on the profits of slavery. To place it above politics is to ignore that legacy, which is a political stance.

The Devil’s Arse

As for Mark’s belief that Blake would have welcomed the Coronation of Charles, I find that impossible to believe. We know that Blake was tried for his life for an act of sedition in which he ‘damn’d’ the King. Of course, this was according to the hostile soldiery who gave witness against him. Most of the soldiers’ evidence sounds concocted, but I’ve always thought the words ascribed to Blake are the only part of his testimony that rings true. Fortunately, the jury was not convinced of this, so they were not enough to convict Blake.

While we know of many cases where Blake takes issue with this or that King – with that proto-Trump, George III in America: A Prophesy, for instance – the pithiest comment he made on monarchy as such has been systematically ignored and suppressed. It sits among the annotations to his copy of Francis Bacon’s Essays Moral, Economical, and Political. This copy passed to Samuel Palmer after Blake’s death, and then, via his son, to Geoffrey Keynes, later founder of the Blake Society.

Page 55 of Blake’s copy of the book contains a sketch by him which, according to Robert Rix in 2004, “has never been reproduced and has so far been available to the Blake reader only through the eyewitness accounts of Blake’s editors, who have rendered the contents of the illustration in words.”34 In other words, Blake scholars had mostly preferred that you didn’t see it. Keynes himself describes the sketch as showing “A representation of hinder parts, labelled: The devil’s arse, and descending from it a chain of excrement ending in: A King.” A King is a bit of shit from the arse of the Devil.

Someone after Keynes’s time even managed to erase the top of the sketch, making it completely indecipherable, leaving only the bottom section of the ‘chain’, ending with the words ‘A King’ encircled. We would never have known the context if it were not for the fact that Keynes brought another copy of the same edition as a working copy and filled in the missing sketch himself as a record. This backup copy was only discovered later, thus restoring to the world Blake’s opinion of Kings as such

The sketch accompanies the part of Bacon’s book entitled ‘Of a King’, in which Bacon affirms the divine right of Kings by saying, “A king is a mortal god on earth, unto whom the living God hath lent his own name as a great honour”.35 Blake responded by calling Bacon a “contemptible & abject slave”.36 This makes it very unlikely indeed that he would have been even remotely enthusiastic by the accession of another Windsor to the Crown, ‘Defender of All Faiths’ or not.

Taylor and the Brutes

Kathleen Raine (“one of the few people to understand Blake”, according to Mark37) believed that Blake absorbed Neoplatonism from his acquaintance, the Greek scholar, translator of Plato and Plotinus, Thomas Taylor. In Blake and Tradition, the key work in which Raine claims Blake as an Esoteric Neoplatonist, she says, "Without the aids of Plotinus and Porphyry, the Pymander of Hermes, and, above all, Taylor, Blake's Christianity itself would have been a more limited and lesser matter."38 Taylor, then, according to Temenos wisdom, is the crucial character, whispering Neoplatonic words into Blake’s ear until he slowly became its mouthpiece, and all we need do to see this is call on the services of the brahmin class that can ‘read’ the secret symbolism.

As the Blake Quarterly reviewer, Daniel Hughes, noted, even if you know Raine’s agenda as a booster for Neoplatonism, this attaches extraordinary significance to Taylor, noting in particular that: “Although Miss Raine locates Blake's greatest interest In Taylor's translations and adaptations from the Greek in his work of the I780's and I790's, the influence of Taylor on Blake is certainly regarded as pervasive and significant throughout his career.”39

The Weapon of Laughter Backfires

I happen to think Raine’s work inserting Blake into Traditionalism is wishful thinking and poor scholarship. As Bo Ossian Lindberg put it, “Since Raine does not separate the knower from the known, she fails to realize that Blake as an object of knowing is separate from herself. Therefore, she tends to confuse Blake’s ideas with her own and makes Blake a spokesman for Raine.”40 However, putting that aside for a moment, and assuming for the sake of argument that Raine’s assessment of Taylor’s influence is correct, we can ask what Blake would have learned from him about Neoplatonic non-hierarchical hierarchies and the critique of politics.

Taylor had been landlord to the Wollstonecraft family in the 1770s, and when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792, he was swift to reply with his own, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes, also 1792, in which he argued that if the egalitarian principles of Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine and all were correct, one would have to extend rights also to the animals.

… thus much may suffice, for historical proof, that brutes are equal to men. It only now remains… to demonstrate the same great truth in a similar manner, of vegetables, minerals, and even the most apparently contemptible clod of earth; that was this sublime theory being copiously and accurately discussed, and it's truth established… government may be entirely subverted, subordination abolished and all things everywhere, and in every respect, be common to all.41

In any other circumstances, this would be a masterpiece of speculative political philosophy, prophetic in its insight. However, as the Taylor scholar, Louise Schutz Boaz, explains, the argument of the book is actually “an exercise in irony… in which Taylor, using the weapon of laughter, professed agreement with the radical ideas recently published by two of his friends, Mary Wollstonecroft and Thomas Paine, and by carrying these to their logical extremes, reduced them to absurdity.”42

Against Wollstonecraft and Paine, Taylor believed – in classic Platonic (and, actually, Aristotelian) fashion – that “in every class of beings in the universe… there is a first, a middle, and a last, in order that the progression of things may form one unbroken chain, originating in deity, and terminating in matter… A golden chain of beings formed by the first and smallest class, the multitude forming the lowest.”43 If Blake had absorbed Taylor’s influence, he did so during the years in which the latter wrote these words, and Blake, according to Raine, would have absorbed this belief in a natural hierarchy among humans. Patently, he did no such thing.

The Woman Taken in Adultery

What does it mean to make Blake’s Christianity just another ancient sacred tradition? After all, sacred societies based on syncretic polytheism existed before Christianity, not least in the form of pagan, imperial Rome. We know that Christianity eventually displaced Roman paganism, to the horror of those such as Julian the Apostate, appalled at the superstitious, plebian nature of the new religion.

Arguably, however, it is the plebian nature of Christianity that is at its heart, since it raised up the plebs and slaves, much as Nietzsche said. I do not apologise for quoting David Bentley Hart once more at length, as he speaks of what was, and what remains, so radical in the new faith:

… it is all but impossible for us to recover any real sense of the scandal that many pagans naturally felt at the bizarre prodigality with which the early Christians were willing to grant full humanity to persons of every class and condition, and of either sex… But to hear that tone of alarm in its richest, purest, and most spontaneous registers one really has to repair to the pagans themselves: to Celsus, or Eunapius of Sardis, or the emperor Julian. What they saw, as they peered down upon the Christian movement from the high, narrow summit of their society, was not the understandable ebullition of long-suppressed human longings but the very order of the cosmos collapsing at its base, drawing everything down into the general ruin and obscene squalor of a common humanity. How else could they interpret the spectacle but as a kind of monstrous impiety and noisomely wicked degeneracy?.. Julian complained that the Christians had from the earliest days swelled their ranks with the most vicious, disreputable, and contemptible of persons, while offering only baptism as a remedy for their vileness, as if mere water could cleanse the soul. Eunapius turned away with revulsion from the base gods that the earth was now breeding as a result of Christianity's subversion of good order: men and women of the most deplorable sort, justly tortured, condemned, and executed for their crimes, but glorified after death as martyrs of the faith, their abominable relics venerated in place of the old gods.
The scandal of the pagans, however, was the glory of the church.44

This image of Christianity as a radical assertion of the persona of even the lowest slave or the greatest sinner came to mind when I read Mark’s peculiar account of Blake’s painting, The Woman Taken in Adultery,45 of which he says:

The image shows Jesus leaning over the sand with the woman’s accusers in retreat. And, Biblical stories being spurs to the imagination, Blake takes the opportunity to draw out what he takes to be the core meaning of the incident... Her clothes are dishevelled and her wrists are bound behind her back… She appears to be shamed and trapped. Indeed, whilst Blake shows her accusers departing, the implication is that she is not yet free: might Jesus cast the first stone as, according to the gospels, he is without sin?46

Jesus has said, “let the one without sin cast the first stone.” And of course… Jesus is the one without sin. So he could cast the first stone. It's the poignant moment where we're not sure whether the woman is going to find freedom or condemnation.47

At this point, I had to pause. I could not compute the idea that Jesus, idly doodling in the sand, might be about to commence the stoning so that the mob could then join in. Perhaps I am making too much of such a detail, but to me, all of a sudden, I felt the pagan world rush in, in which it was even conceivable that the Bible would have Christ stone the adulterer as her just deserts (Mark denies that he does so, but assumes it as a possibility).

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Christ not only taught the dignity of slaves, he actually promoted them, saying, for example, that “the first shall be last.” Bizarrely, speaking as a former Anglican clergyman, Mark actually seems to find this idea immoral:

… reading Jesus's aphorisms and his parables, like… “it's easier for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven for the candle to go through the eye of the needle”, as if they're somehow descriptive of a moral recommendation, fundamentally misunderstands what Jesus was about. Partly because a lot of his aphorisms and parables are, on that reading, amoral, if not immoral. You know, “the first will be last” and so on. What could be more offensive to a moral view of things?48

What would the King Charles, make of such apparent criticism of the rich? Was Jesus some sort of Communist? About this, I hardly know what to say, and I leave it to speak for itself.

Concluding Post-Scientific Thoughts

Fancy Versus the Esemplasm

On the central topic of the book, Blake’s idea of the imagination, the author has little to say, because he equates it directly with vision, the goal of his engagement with Blake, without tying any of his observations to an examination of the imagination other than to say that it is not a faculty of the individual mind but rather identical to the ‘active intelligence’ which Neoplatonism sees at the root of all:

… the imagination… is not only the capacity to see but is, simultaneously, the source of all that can be seen. The imagination is not, therefore, our own.. Rather, human beings, animals and plants, earth and heavens, are “contain’d in the All Glorious Imagination”. The imagination is the realm within which abundant reality dwells.49

According to this, when Blake praises the imagination as “the Divine Body of the Lord Jesus. blessed for ever,” he is therefore only saluting the ineffable One of the late Platonists, and not Christ specifically.50 Mark is right to see imagination as more than the property of the individual, but goes too far in making it merely an aspect of Plato’s abstract One.

There is no discussion here of the (often occluded) history of philosophical speculation about the imagination, and of how Blake’s conception fits with the most radical ideas in that history. It would be too much to expect Mark to have considered, for example, the post-Marxist Cornelius Castoriadis’s picture of the imagination as the driving force of history (“History is essentially poiesis, not imitative poetry, but creation and ontological genesis in and through individuals doing and representing/saying,")51 but it is noticeable that, when he does touch on the topic, while rightly rejecting both Samuel Johnson’s rejection of imagination as ‘fancy’, and John Higgs’s solipsistic idea of imagination as an engine for projecting meaning onto dead nature,52 he does not pick up on Samuel Coleridge’s belief – in opposition to Wordsworth – in the ‘primary imagination’ as “the living power and prime agent of all perception is a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.”53

The Withering of Blake’s Minute Particulars

If I have been unfair to Mark it is because it is hard to write a book of this length without saying or reflecting something of interest about Blake, even if only by quoting him extensively, and I have not talked about that. The reason is that this is not a book that dabbles in Neoplatonism, but one that is saturated in it, in which every utterance of Blake’s is turned around to become Neoplatonic orthodoxy. He argues that “The Neopatronic tradition is a bit like a subterranean river and it throws up springs and rivers and new fonts of meaning in every moment,”54 including having ‘thrown up’ Blake. In this way, the ‘minute particulars’ of Blake’s art are reduced to outpourings of esoteric Neoplatonism.

There are several reasons why we should reject this analysis over and beyond the way it turns Blake into a mere sock-puppet for Plotinus and Kathleen Raine. It will not do to reduce Christianity to just another ‘sacred tradition’, to be folded back into Tradition. As I argue above, the key difference is the revolution Christ launched in heaven itself, tearing down ancient hierarchies to assert the divinity of even the most humble men and women, in defiance of the sort of cheerful polytheism Mark would have us fold it back into.

That Ancient Theodicy

Mark speaks repeatedly of the divinity inherent in each individual, without noticing that it is alien to his own tradition except as an theological nicety with few implications for how we live our lives, other than the way it underscores his idea of Vision. It is this reversion to the moral world of paganism which allows Mark to celebrate the ‘religiosity’ of Indian society, superior to our own, despite its caste system and current Fascist order. For Mark, the suffering of the victims of fascism is just God’s way of gently clueing us into his grace.

This becomes clear in Mark’s treatment of Blake’s Illustrations to The Book of Job, where he argues in favour of ‘the patience of Job’, sitting out misfortune, because the right vision of God “comes only after pain. Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades or loose the bans of Orion, Job is asked… which clearly he cannot. But he will acknowledge the one who can and thereby find his human vocation consciously to join creature and Creator in songs of praise.”

Mark concludes that “suffering is not deserved as a punishment... No: the gospel is judgement that liberates.”55 Vision, then, is the result of recognising the power of God over creation and submitting to it, accepting pain as the price of wisdom. To this, I can only say that this just recycles that ancient theodicy which has served to sanctify the way things are since time immemorial.

A second objection to Neoplatonism is that, the undoubted genius of Pseudo-Dionysus notwithstanding, it is impossible to successfully fold Christian metaphysics back into Platonism. I won’t dwell on the issue, except to say that all the subtle dialectics in the world is never going to make for a fit between Platonic idealism, with its emphasis on ‘The One’, and such staples of Christian faith as the Trinity, the incarnation (in which God takes human form), or the Resurrection. These are undoubtedly mysteries that dialectics cannot unpick.

Finally, Mark explicitly rejects simple Romantic hankering after the past. He is perceptive enough to see that Blake “did not proceed by rejecting the political and technological revolutions that so dramatically marked his era… or by appealing to lost times and distant moods.”56 And yet there is no other way to understand Traditionalism than as precisely such a return to pre-modernity. Either that, or traditionalism is no more than a pipe dream, the thought of which keeps old Neoplatonists warm at night.

The fact is that, whenever Traditionalism sets out to engage with the world, it invariably takes the form of Fascism and extreme Conservative reaction: I repeat my list of the best known contemporary Traditionalists: Bannon, Dugin, Bolsonaro. Among other things, these would all be prime suspects in any unsolved case involving the stoning of an adulterous woman.

There is no squaring off Christianity with paganism, no folding Blake back seamlessly into the esoteric underground of the Brahmins, and, as David Bentley Hart explains, no way back to the sacred societies of old:

Return to the old compact is impossible... We cannot, and should not try, to revive historically exhausted epochs of the spirit; the most we would be able to achieve is to put their cadavers on display in ostentatious reliquaries and parade them through the public square. Ultimately, such nostalgia simply becomes fascism, as there is no way of making it truly attractive to the disenchanted. It is itself merely disenchantment in a grotesquely inverted expression.57

If this review seems one-sided compared to the tameness of the podcast interview, I can only apologise by saying that the notes above are what I would have added to the discussion if I had felt able to do so. Mark will doubtless feel that I simply need to go away and read Plotinus and Pseudo-Dionysius more diligently. Perhaps so, but what I say above hopefully expresses my worries about his book as well as I am able.

Andy Wilson
London
2025-07

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26

David Bentley Hart, ‘Exit, Pursued by Voltaire - Part the Second: Christ and Cosmopolis 4’’, Leaves in the Wind, Substack, substack.com, 2025-07-17, accessed 2025-07-17.

Leaves in the Wind

Exit, pursued by Voltaire – Part the Second

Blé (Nonidi), 29 Messidor, CCXXXIII…

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9 months ago · 87 likes · 28 comments · David Bentley Hart

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David Bentley Hart, ‘Exit, pursued by Voltaire - Part the Third: Christ and Cosmopolis’, Leaves in the Wind, Substack, substack.com, 2025-07-25, accessed 2025-07-25.

Leaves in the Wind

Exit, pursued by Voltaire – Part the Third

Armoise (Septidi), 7 Thermidor, CCXXXIII…

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9 months ago · 73 likes · 37 comments · David Bentley Hart

Black American music (country and electric blues, folk, jazz from New Orleans to AACM, soul and RnB, funk, hip hop and more) is the crowning glory of 20th-century art, documenting the trauma of slavery and racism, commemorating the lives of its victims, but also celebrating the existence of those still standing, and riffing on the ignorance and injustice of its perpetrators. How this produces, for example, both Baptist hymns and wildly ecstatic dance music, is a question for alchemists as much as anthropologists. This music provides an immensity of resources, moral and intellectual, against the new MAGA Klansman’s regime.

The following selection is not meant to represent black music as such, I merely highlight some of the productions of the spirit that directly faced into American racism.

Various: Run, N*****, Run, (1851)

This version, Moses Platt (1933).

Run, n*****, run; de patter-roller catch you
Run, n*****, run, it's almost day
Run, n*****, run, de patter-roller catch you
Run, n*****, run, and try to get away

The music business has long been highly segregated, with its various charts famously catering to different ethnicities. History does not conform so easily to the neat racial compartmentalisation of contemporary Rock, RnB, Country, etc., charts. The music itself has often been trimmed and nurtured to make it fit these borders more neatly.

But at the origin of all this folk music, the lines of demarcation hardly exist at all, and the music easily hopped over boundaries we simply take for granted today. African banjos, German tubas, military percussion, English folk songs, pipe bands, and myriad other elements were all freely mixed and recombined in popular tradition as far back as we can tell.

"Run, N*****, Run" was first documented in 1851. Responding to the rise of slave patrols in the southern United States, the song is about a man who attempts to run from a slave patrol and avoid capture.

It was one of the oldest of plantation songs. It has been recorded a few times since 1920, twice by the resourceful Alan Lomax.

Norfolk Jazz and Jubilee Quartet: My Lord's Gonna Move This Wicked Race (1923)

My Lord's gonna move this wicked race
Lord, Lord, this wicked race
My Lord's gonna move this wicked race
Gonna raise up a nation shall obey

The Norfolk Jubilee Quartet's version was the 35th ‘race record’ from Paramount Records. Malcolm X claimed the song was sung by slaves, arguing that it reflected black spiritual life of the time: they wanted to escape enslavement.

Witnessing to its popularity, the song was also recorded by the Frank Luther Quartette, Dixie Jubilee Singers, Southland Jubilee Singers, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, King's Heralds, Alex Bradford, Brooklyn Allstars, The Gospel Sons Soul-Po-Tion, Selah Jubilee Singers, and Charlie Monroe and his Kentucky Pardners.

Bessie Tucker: Key to the Bushes (1928)

I've got the key to the bushes, and I'm rarin' to go
I ought to leave here runnin' but that's, most too slow
Captain's got a big horse pistol, ha-ha, and he think he's bad
I'm gonna take it this mornin', if he make me mad

Bessie was born in Rusk, Cherokee County, Texas in 1906. She wrote this herself. The pianist Whistlin' Alex Moore said that Tucker and Ida May Mack (who shared the recording session) were both "tough cookies... don't mess with them". Bessie died in 1933 at the age of 26.

Billie Holiday: Strange Fruit (1939)

Strange Fruit was a song written by Jewish American Abel Meeropol and recorded by Billie Holiday. The lyrics come from a poem by Meeropol, protesting the lynching of Black Americans with lyrics that compare the victims to the fruit of trees. He was responding to Lawrence Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. Lynchings reached a peak at the turn of the century, but continued deep into it. 

Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun claimed this song was "the beginning of the civil rights movement."

Meeropol was a teacher at a public school, and published his poem under the title ‘Bitter Fruit’ in 1937 in The New York Teacher, a magazine of the New York teachers’ union. It was also published in the Marxist journal, The New Masses. Holiday first performed the song at Café Society, Greenwich Village, in 1939.

Muddy Waters: I Can't Be Satisfied (1948)

I be troubled
I be all worried in mind
Well honey, ain't no way in the world for me to be satisfied
And I just can't keep from crying

When Southern country blues artists moved north to get jobs in Chicago and the like, they started to play with groups of (initially) pick-up backing musicians in much louder environments, which necessitated plugging in amps, microphones, and electric guitars if they were to be heard. The resulting sound of electricity arguably woke the Western World.

”I can't remember much of what I was singin' now 'ceptin' I do remember I was always singin', ‘I can't be satisfied, I be all troubled in mind.’ Seems to me like I was always singin' that, because I was always singin' just the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there in Mississippi.”
Muddy Waters

Johnny Otis: Willie and the Hand Jive (1958)

I know a cat named Way-Out Willie
He got a cool little chick named Rockin' Billie
Do you walk and stroll with Susie Q
And do that crazy hand jive too?

When a high school counsellor advised him to quit his Black friends, Loannis Veliotes dropped out of school and became R’n’B legend, Johnny Otis. His book defending the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Listen to the Lambs, nearly ended his career.

Do we bury the dead in American flags? or cancelled welfare checks? or Baptist choir robes? or Los Angeles Police Department handcuffs? or eviction notices? or selective service questionnaires? Do we mark the graves with crosses? asbestos or kerosene-drenched? How about marking them with fragments of the Watts Towers? or with the pens used to sign the Civil Rights Act? or swastikas?

As I write this, the curfew imposed upon the entire Negro ommunity is still in effect. After 8pm you keep off the street. All day and all night, trucks loaded with uniforms and machine guns and bayonets roll by our house and all other Negro houses. Like frozen iron porcupines they crawl down our streets and through our minds.
Johnny Otis, ‘First Letter to Griff’, Listen to the Lambs (1965)

The song was inspired by the singing of a chain gang Otis heard on tour. It’s lyrics concern a confined man who can only dances with his hands. Footage of Otis' performance of Willie and the Hand Jive at the Monterey Jazz Festival appears in the film Play Misty for Me. My main point is that the book is great: as is Otis’s son, Shuggie.

Any similarity to The Rolling Stones’ Not Fade Away is probably entirely coincidental.

Charles Mingus: Faubus Fables (1959)

In 1957, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus sent the National Guard to block the racial integration of Little Rock Central High School by nine African American children. Faubus Fables / Fables of Faubus was recorded for Mingus' 1959 album, Mingus Ah Um. Columbia Records wouldn’t allow the lyrics to the song to be used or published, so the song was released as an instrumental. A year later, Mingus re-recorded it with lyrics:

Oh, Lord, don't let 'em shoot us
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em stab us
Oh, Lord, don't let 'em tar and feather us
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan
Name me someone who's ridiculous, Danny…
Danny: Governor Faubus!
Charles Mingus