The idea of Occult Surrealist Automatism is compelling. In 1980 I went to Egypt to see a few things. While I was in Luxor I dropped my last tab of pre Operation Julie pink acid and had a few happy hours wandering around the Luxor Temple, sitting out front of the old Luxor Hotel discussing the Arabic names of the stars with a hotel worker who'd be given the job of baby sitting me because I was up late and was presumed to be sick and unable to sleep - which in a way I guess I was. Fried by the acid and the heat I toddled back to my room where I had a weird encounter with some snake like entity that spoke in some crazy language from the white noise static of the air conditioner - it was like being in Eraserhead for fucks sake, faintly disturbing because it was telling me I was not welcome there and that I needed to bugger off - now being a sensible type of person I put this down to the acid paranoia and my own subconscious sick sense of mocking humour, especially regarding all that hippy shit! I certainly didn't attribute this malign manifestation to Ra's nemesis the giant snake Apep or a biblical wicked serpent, instead I relegated it to some Shatner/Nimoy era Star trek type thing that I could just shrug off and cynically laugh at at. Safe in this knowledge I left early the next morning to go by donkey to the Valley of the Kings - to chance my luch with the curse of the Pharoahs.
A few years later I was reading E A Wallace Budges translation/transliteration of The Papyrus of Ani and in order to make sense of the vowel free consonents of the romanised written hieroglyphics I was reading the text out aloud - and I recognised the sounds as being pretty much the same as the words spoken to me by the snake in the airco. Now the rational part of me says "yeah but you are retrofitting your memories and lets face it they're acid memories at that so what do you expect?" But I have a catalogue of irrational weird shit that mostly is acid free and which I truthfully experienced and have no rational explanation for, and this Ancient Egyptian Snake in the Airco is one of them.
Lacan forbids us to even think we have access to the pre linguistic landscapes of our very early childhood, but I have, if not memories, then impressions of those times. The very first time I took acid - I was 17 - I 'remembered' the experience I kept saying to the people babysitting me " I remember this!" by which I meant my prelinguistic early months, I'm sure of it. Lacan is a theoretician I don't recall him ever saying he had had hands on experience of the very areas he says he is academically dealing with, and I think he is wrong.
I have a phobia, it doesn't matter what it is but I have worked out that it must have originated in the first few months of my life. It has, therefore, followed me all my life, so much so that it's impossible for me to consider my life without it, it's like an armature upon which a large part of my constructed sense of self is built. At first it was very unwelcome, but over the years I have come to value it greatly because it's power originates not in the object that invokes the phobic response but in the access to era and the ancient pre verbal psychic landscape it gives access to. A time and a place which is according to Lacan foreclosed to us.
The occult is problematic but it has serious credentials because more often than not it is uncanny.
Such a great story… I must read the papyrus of Ani again. There are some lovely reproductions of the texts…
All this is on my mind at the moment. I was hoping to write a review of Breton’s (recently published in English) ‘Magic Art’, but I realise after reviewing the Ithell Colquhoun exhibition that it leads into these deep and interesting waters.
I love what you say about experience in the presumably phase of childhood. I don’t think I remember any of it as such but I am sure you are right, especially about your phobia.
Thanks Andy. If you've not already come across The Dawning Moon of the Mind by Susan Brind Morrow I would seriously recommend you do. It's a fine translation of The Pyramid Texts from The Pyramid of Unas at Sakkara. Brind Morrow brings a truly poetic interpretation of the texts that is fresh and free of the often dry rationality of the standard academic translations without descending into what I call wishy washy new age crap and she is refreshingly scholarly but open minded. I was in Sakkara/Abu Sir last month for ten days, the Pyramids of Sneferu at Dashur are truly exceptional, free from tourists and, older than those at Gizeh. The achitecture of The Red or Northern Pyramid is equally as impressive as Khufu's. Egypt, ironically is ridiculously affordable desination for a pensioner, it's cheaper to live there than here in Europe (and Belgium is already a lot cheaper than the UK trust me!) If you can afford it you should go because nothing replaces actually being there. Suddenly all the history and 'mythology' falls into place once you are in the landscape. It is from this unique landscape that ancient Egyptian thought emerges. The magic of the stories grows out, rather logically from simple accurate observations of the landscape. The immediate proximity of the desert to the fertile cultivated land is something to be savoured, the Western Lands have a real whiff of the eternal about them. I was perched up on the entrance to the Red Pyramid drinking tea with the site watchmen looking out across the desert to Djosers Step Pyramid on the horizon it really was truly quite profound, you turn your head 90 degress and look into the green of the nile valley and you sense that you are 'somewhere else' looking back into the world of the living from... somewhere else.
It brings to mind Susanna Kaysen's quite stunning introductory chapter in her memoir Girl,Interupted, that she entitles - Towards a topography of the Parallel Universe... You'll know the film, but the book is a true master piece of desciption of the experience of going insane
"....most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest, and not every action ca be counted on to proke an equal and oppposite reaction. Time too, is different. It may run in circles flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.
These are facts you find out later, though
Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easlity see the world you came from"
I love that last line....
Come to think of it it's also a perfect account of tripping and indeed those moments when I manage to reclaim access to my childhood world. The phobia thing is is weird - i can't stand mushrooms - they have an instant repulsion for me that I always think is best described by that feeling you get when you hold two magnets similar poles facing and try to force them together - literally repulsion. I worked out the timing recently by coming across some in a local park here in Leuven while riding my bike which isolated me somewhat... enough...to retain a rational strand of thought and so at that instant I had a mental image of the same species of mushroom laying on it's top on a gravely dirt surface. I knew where this surface was, it was the yard outside my grandmothers back garden where I spent my first year living in a tiny caravan with my parents while they waited for their council house to be built - I was born in August 1956 and we moved into the new house in 1957 so given the dates, this places me firmly in the first 18 months of my life. I don't actually think the mushroom is the orginal source of the fear, I think that attribute goes to my grandmother who by any account was not a nice person and I think the mushroom is a case of classical conditioning - an early example of the symbolic order that was later to be established that then occults the pre-symbolic order once and for all. The mushroom phobia is a real gift, it's like a bag jamming the door open through which at times I can creep back to the parallel universe just as Kaysen so poetically describes.
Maybe I should finally start to write about this topic in my embrionic substack...but first I have a painting to start.
I wish I had known of Caillois when studying modern languages, and choosing Surrealism as one of my "specialist" papers! I could have united my fascinations for geology and early 20th century literature. Thank you for providing a portal to revived passions. Incidentally there is some nominative determinism - Caillou is French for stone or pebble. I've been very glad in recent years to see the women artists get the attention they always richly deserved. They were all too often regarded as "muses"
Fascinating. I only knew of Callois by name, College of Sociology, and association with Bataille. Getting a copy of The Writing of Stones post haste (edit: never mind, copies are expensive). Thanks again for another great essay.
The idea of Occult Surrealist Automatism is compelling. In 1980 I went to Egypt to see a few things. While I was in Luxor I dropped my last tab of pre Operation Julie pink acid and had a few happy hours wandering around the Luxor Temple, sitting out front of the old Luxor Hotel discussing the Arabic names of the stars with a hotel worker who'd be given the job of baby sitting me because I was up late and was presumed to be sick and unable to sleep - which in a way I guess I was. Fried by the acid and the heat I toddled back to my room where I had a weird encounter with some snake like entity that spoke in some crazy language from the white noise static of the air conditioner - it was like being in Eraserhead for fucks sake, faintly disturbing because it was telling me I was not welcome there and that I needed to bugger off - now being a sensible type of person I put this down to the acid paranoia and my own subconscious sick sense of mocking humour, especially regarding all that hippy shit! I certainly didn't attribute this malign manifestation to Ra's nemesis the giant snake Apep or a biblical wicked serpent, instead I relegated it to some Shatner/Nimoy era Star trek type thing that I could just shrug off and cynically laugh at at. Safe in this knowledge I left early the next morning to go by donkey to the Valley of the Kings - to chance my luch with the curse of the Pharoahs.
A few years later I was reading E A Wallace Budges translation/transliteration of The Papyrus of Ani and in order to make sense of the vowel free consonents of the romanised written hieroglyphics I was reading the text out aloud - and I recognised the sounds as being pretty much the same as the words spoken to me by the snake in the airco. Now the rational part of me says "yeah but you are retrofitting your memories and lets face it they're acid memories at that so what do you expect?" But I have a catalogue of irrational weird shit that mostly is acid free and which I truthfully experienced and have no rational explanation for, and this Ancient Egyptian Snake in the Airco is one of them.
Lacan forbids us to even think we have access to the pre linguistic landscapes of our very early childhood, but I have, if not memories, then impressions of those times. The very first time I took acid - I was 17 - I 'remembered' the experience I kept saying to the people babysitting me " I remember this!" by which I meant my prelinguistic early months, I'm sure of it. Lacan is a theoretician I don't recall him ever saying he had had hands on experience of the very areas he says he is academically dealing with, and I think he is wrong.
I have a phobia, it doesn't matter what it is but I have worked out that it must have originated in the first few months of my life. It has, therefore, followed me all my life, so much so that it's impossible for me to consider my life without it, it's like an armature upon which a large part of my constructed sense of self is built. At first it was very unwelcome, but over the years I have come to value it greatly because it's power originates not in the object that invokes the phobic response but in the access to era and the ancient pre verbal psychic landscape it gives access to. A time and a place which is according to Lacan foreclosed to us.
The occult is problematic but it has serious credentials because more often than not it is uncanny.
Such a great story… I must read the papyrus of Ani again. There are some lovely reproductions of the texts…
All this is on my mind at the moment. I was hoping to write a review of Breton’s (recently published in English) ‘Magic Art’, but I realise after reviewing the Ithell Colquhoun exhibition that it leads into these deep and interesting waters.
I love what you say about experience in the presumably phase of childhood. I don’t think I remember any of it as such but I am sure you are right, especially about your phobia.
Thanks Andy. If you've not already come across The Dawning Moon of the Mind by Susan Brind Morrow I would seriously recommend you do. It's a fine translation of The Pyramid Texts from The Pyramid of Unas at Sakkara. Brind Morrow brings a truly poetic interpretation of the texts that is fresh and free of the often dry rationality of the standard academic translations without descending into what I call wishy washy new age crap and she is refreshingly scholarly but open minded. I was in Sakkara/Abu Sir last month for ten days, the Pyramids of Sneferu at Dashur are truly exceptional, free from tourists and, older than those at Gizeh. The achitecture of The Red or Northern Pyramid is equally as impressive as Khufu's. Egypt, ironically is ridiculously affordable desination for a pensioner, it's cheaper to live there than here in Europe (and Belgium is already a lot cheaper than the UK trust me!) If you can afford it you should go because nothing replaces actually being there. Suddenly all the history and 'mythology' falls into place once you are in the landscape. It is from this unique landscape that ancient Egyptian thought emerges. The magic of the stories grows out, rather logically from simple accurate observations of the landscape. The immediate proximity of the desert to the fertile cultivated land is something to be savoured, the Western Lands have a real whiff of the eternal about them. I was perched up on the entrance to the Red Pyramid drinking tea with the site watchmen looking out across the desert to Djosers Step Pyramid on the horizon it really was truly quite profound, you turn your head 90 degress and look into the green of the nile valley and you sense that you are 'somewhere else' looking back into the world of the living from... somewhere else.
It brings to mind Susanna Kaysen's quite stunning introductory chapter in her memoir Girl,Interupted, that she entitles - Towards a topography of the Parallel Universe... You'll know the film, but the book is a true master piece of desciption of the experience of going insane
"....most people pass over incrementally, making a series of perforations in the membrane between here and there until an opening exists. And who can resist an opening? In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended. What goes up does not necessarily come down, a body at rest does not tend to stay at rest, and not every action ca be counted on to proke an equal and oppposite reaction. Time too, is different. It may run in circles flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of molecules is fluid: Tables can be clocks; faces, flowers.
These are facts you find out later, though
Another odd feature of the parallel universe is that although it is invisible from this side, once you are in it you can easlity see the world you came from"
I love that last line....
Come to think of it it's also a perfect account of tripping and indeed those moments when I manage to reclaim access to my childhood world. The phobia thing is is weird - i can't stand mushrooms - they have an instant repulsion for me that I always think is best described by that feeling you get when you hold two magnets similar poles facing and try to force them together - literally repulsion. I worked out the timing recently by coming across some in a local park here in Leuven while riding my bike which isolated me somewhat... enough...to retain a rational strand of thought and so at that instant I had a mental image of the same species of mushroom laying on it's top on a gravely dirt surface. I knew where this surface was, it was the yard outside my grandmothers back garden where I spent my first year living in a tiny caravan with my parents while they waited for their council house to be built - I was born in August 1956 and we moved into the new house in 1957 so given the dates, this places me firmly in the first 18 months of my life. I don't actually think the mushroom is the orginal source of the fear, I think that attribute goes to my grandmother who by any account was not a nice person and I think the mushroom is a case of classical conditioning - an early example of the symbolic order that was later to be established that then occults the pre-symbolic order once and for all. The mushroom phobia is a real gift, it's like a bag jamming the door open through which at times I can creep back to the parallel universe just as Kaysen so poetically describes.
Maybe I should finally start to write about this topic in my embrionic substack...but first I have a painting to start.
I wish I had known of Caillois when studying modern languages, and choosing Surrealism as one of my "specialist" papers! I could have united my fascinations for geology and early 20th century literature. Thank you for providing a portal to revived passions. Incidentally there is some nominative determinism - Caillou is French for stone or pebble. I've been very glad in recent years to see the women artists get the attention they always richly deserved. They were all too often regarded as "muses"
Fascinating. I only knew of Callois by name, College of Sociology, and association with Bataille. Getting a copy of The Writing of Stones post haste (edit: never mind, copies are expensive). Thanks again for another great essay.