oh don't lean on me man
cause you can't afford the ticket
~ david bowie ~

So this is from what? Year and a half ago? Wish I coulda made it.

Next Saturday sees the start of the weirdest weekend of the year. The Fortean Times, house journal of both sceptics and open-mouthed believers in everything from weeping statues to the Great Goat of Clapham, is holding an "Unconvention".... Drawn to this occasion like iron filings to a magnet are not only an unhealthy sprinkling of UFO anoraks, but serious students of the paranormal, some of whom are not entirely predictable folk themselves. There is, for example, Gary Lachman, the former bass player for the pop legend Blondie, whose special subject, upon which he will be lecturing, is Julius Evola, otherwise known as "Mussolini's mystic".

Evola was an occult guru who hobnobbed with Nazis and Italian fascists. Evola... believed that there was nothing in modern life worth saving, and that we are living in the Kali Yuga, or dark age. His followers later tried to usher in a new and better golden age by blowing up an Italian railway station, killing 85 people and maiming hundreds more.

from: Observatory by David Randall
source: The Independent Sunday (London), 24 October 24 2004

As I may have related elsewhere at some point, I often use my car radio as a kind of I Ching  oracle, tacitly posing the generic question, "so what's up?" then punching the ON button. Friday afternoon, on my way to the (where else?) bookstore, I got this answer:

By the time I tuned in to what it was saying, it was over. This can also be said of the events in my life I relate this to. Working on mysteries without any clue, to risk further mixing the rock-and-roll metaphor. But then again, why not go 100% depth-first subterranean?

As are we all these days, though for different reasons. It's touching (to me), poignant to think back on the paranoia of that period and to realize it was our time of innocence. The rough beasts we feared in our stonedest dreams now stalk the world in broad daylight. And worse, thinking: we could be heroes. Gonna get me a gun rack for the F-250 and a bumper sticker at says No Pain No Jane. Yeah, gonna get down in it  this time, baby. Gonna get with the program. Dust off and nuke the planet from high orbit. Some things are just not explained by natural selection, social Darwinism notwithstanding -- social Darwinism, correction: case in point. Evolutionary psychology may explain why baby monkey's cling to their mothers. Answer: because those who did are the ones that didn't get eaten by hyenas. But it doesn't explain the last ten years, or twenty or one hundred. Doesn't explain how our future morphed out of a much more recent past that's still as murky as the Devonian or Cretaceous. Murkier, as there is no fossil record. Unless you count Ziggy.

This is not a manual. Not a technical reference, Tab B into Slot A. These are not directions, from which, if you follow them closely, some preordained reward for your attention to detail and procedure will result. This is writing. Make of it what you will. That's what I do. Though there's a method to the madness. It involves a kind of historical back-tracking, a kind of archeology with dental picks and camel hair brushes, sifting and sorting through strata of stone and bone and dirt and other sorts of coverup, whether by natural sedimentary memory overlay or conscious process of revisionist distortion, whether the vaunted spiritual insight of Emerson's Self Reliance: "let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Woden, courage and constancy, in our Saxon breasts." -- or Bowie's sweet talking his little China Girl: "Visions of swastikas in my head ... I'll give you eyes of blue. I'll give you men who want to rule the world." And why do I trust Bowie more in this? Because he's mocking the high-horse racial arrogance that pretends to depend only on itself, but in fact lives by parasitism and predation on the "outer" world it so disdains. But Emerson wins hands-down against plebeian rock. Emerson, after all, unlike Bowie (who could even imagine?), is published in the prestigious Library of America.

As is Ezra Pound, about whom I promised last time to tell you something personally relevant. Which I might as well get out of the way right now, before I forget how to work it back in. It's this: my father used to visit him in that mental hospital he got stashed in after the Second World War. I have some vague memory of him mentioning it on a couple occasions. And it fits. My father was a medievalist (doctorate from Harvard on the G.I. Bill) who could read ancient Greek and Latin, Italian, knew the stories the myths the literature, and was therefore one of the not-so-many who could actually read Pound's Cantos. Except, I guess, for the Chinese bits. I've know about this sort of stuff since I was three or four years old. Heard the names, listened, paid attention, poked into the books sometimes. But I never read Pound. Never cared that much. Never thought about the guy at all until recently. Until a few days ago.

I've been tracking down stuff about this other guy named Julius Evola (see Highbeam clip at top), who was involved in something called Traditionalism -- with a capital T, so not any old traditionalism -- along with Rene Guenon and Ananda Coomaraswamy. Basically: don't ask. He was lifelong pals with Mircea Eliade -- the original Mr Shamanism, and part-time Romanian fascist, which latter bit of his CV he edited out when he ended up at the University of Chicago post dubya-dubya 2. Evola was also a fascist. But a bigtime, full-time fascist, who never tried to pave it over. Hardly. It gets complicated, to say the least, and I don't know the whole story yet. But my radar tells me that Evola is part of the overall story I'm slowly but inexorably cobbling together. Especially as he was a spiritual  fascist, an occultist  fascist, heavy into stuff like esoteric Yoga and Tantric sex. You know the type.

Now the only other Italian fascists I knew about were the last baker's dozen of Catholic Popes, Benito Mussolini (duh), and Ezra Pound. So I started poking around Pound. I knew he'd written a book called Guide to Kulchur, originally published in 1938, and brought out by New Directions 30 years later. I got my hands on a copy, but no luck. So far I haven't found anything to indicate that Pound and Evola ever met, or even spoke. But look what I did  find in Kulchur...

"Old Krore" (G. R. S. Mead) never did any harm. He is even mentioned with respect by various continental editors of mystical snippets, tracts, volumes, etc. He used to say: There is something beyond that. Mme Blavatsky said: Now Mead, when you get to the North Pole you think that the earth is a ball, but you know, Mead, it isn't, when you get there you will find another sphere. . . .

(mental picture is, I think, a species of dumb-bell or figure 8 solid).

Mead years after was looking for a meaning and did not suspect the old lady of pulling his leg.

But the Madame was not pulling his leg. At least not in the way Pound surmised. For the entire mind-boggling story, see Arktos: The Polar Myth in Science, Symbolism, and Nazi Survival. Perhaps you recall my post of last Friday, wherein I mentioned, en passant, "weirdball New Age theories about how the earth is really hollow and there are UFO bases inside from which Hitler and the Waffen SS will soon return to conquer the world and establish a million-year Fourth Reich." Yeah, well if you want to know more about this um theory, Arktos is your book.

Obviously, the dear Madame knew nothing of Nazis -- she was long gone by that time -- but some of them evidently knew quite a lot about her. More to the point (no snickering there in the back!), Ezra Pound was clearly chummy with Blavatsky. And also with her equal in charlatanry, the man behind the curtain himself: Georges Ivanovitch Gurdjieff. The following is from The Letters of Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson, and is therefore not surprisingly a letter from Ezra Pound to Margaret Anderson. Who knows, perhaps he'd had a few...

...in yr/ youth an inegsperience of the London scene, as from 1908 yu NEGlect certain factors / London BOMbarded with mystics, Blavatsky, Quest Society, Echos from the Gnosis (GRS Mead) Wisdom of the East Series, [A.R.] Orage an the unreadable Mahabharatta, etc.

Yeats on W[yndham].L[ewis] as "poWWnd's zevil geenius"/ etc. people been tryin to change WynDAMMn's KeraKter for some time. Gurdieff I thot a man an a bruvver, but NObuddy is goin to swallow Ouspensky.

The full title from whence that grafik derives is In Search of the Miraculous: The Teachings of G.I. Gurdieff (never mind what Amazon says) by P.D. Ouspensky. Just for a little, you know, extra context. But the real miracle here is that, if you look closely at the cover, you'll see it says "with a foreword by Marianne Williamson." You remember Marianne, right? I'm starting to feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day.

So anyway, it's crystal clear from all this that Ezra Pound -- who is often credited with having basically invented high modernism single-handed -- was well aware of the ectoplasmic drafts swirling about Europe in those heady just-post-fin-de-siécle days of yore. But he wasn't having the Occult. He was having the Mussolini.

It's pushing 4am and I haven't even gotten to Synchronicity City yet. Let's see if I can do this quick. OK, so last week I was poking through that Library of America edition of Pound, most fascinated by the biographical timeline in the back pages. When he was arrested in Italy. When he was shipped back to the U.S. to be tried for treason. Seems he'd made these radio broadcasts for the bad guys. Here's a clip from "Ezra Pound Speaking": Radio Speeches of World War II. Cover your eyes if you don't like uh negativity.

• For two centuries, ever since the brute Cromwell brought 'em back into England, the kikes have sucked out your vitals. A mild penetration, for a hundred years they have bootlicked your nobility and now where is your nobility?
• I think it might be a good thing to hang Roosevelt and a few hundred yids IF you can do it by due legal process, NOT otherwise. Law must be preserved. I know this may sound tame, but so is it. It is sometimes hard to think so. Hard to think that the 35 ex-army subalterns or whatever who wanted to bump off all the kike congressmen weren't just a bit crude and simpliste. Sometimes one feels that it would be better to get the job done somehow, ANY how, than to delay execution.
• A chair has been founded in the Sorbonne to study modern Jewish history, i.e., the role of the kike in modern history.... I don't think there is any American law that permits you to shoot Nic. Butler. It is a pity but so is it. No ex post facto laws are to be dreamt of. Not that Frankfurter or any other damn Jews care a hoot for law or for the American Constitution.

And so on. The government ruled him insane so they wouldn't have to waste this great poet. He nearly got sprung at one point -- he was in stir for something like 12 years -- but one of his young proteges hooked up with American Nazi Party leader George Lincoln Rockwell, blew up a desegregated school, and the court was like well... maybe not this year, Ezra.

I'm sitting on the floor at Barnes & Noble last Friday night reading this stuff, and finally, it was just getting all too much -- perhaps at this point you know the feeling. So I left that section and retreated to Psychology, where I thought it might be a little safer. No luck. Because I start looking at this book I've seen there a hundred times but that I've never had much interest in. Plus, it's all shrink wrapped. However, I think maybe it'll get me out of this whole jump-down-turn-around Poundian fascist trip. Look, no possible relationship (is what I'm thinking): Analyzing Freud: Letters of H.D., Bryher, and Their Circle.

Now somewhere in the back of my capacious mind, I've got the initials H.D. stored. And somewhere pretty close by -- thanks to the miracle of Neuroscience -- a trickle charge from that storage address lights up a tiny neural-neon sign that says: Hilda Doolittle. Don't ask me how it happens, it just does. I flip the book over, read...

In addition, the book includes H.D.'s and Bryher's letters to and from Havelock Ellis, Kenneth MacPhereson, Conrad Aiken, Ezra Pound...

At this point there are groundhogs popping their heads up through the carpet. To avoid them, I cross the store again, find the Library of America Pound where I left it, running to escape too much bad news. I open to the first section. "Hilda's Book," it says.

Later, back home, sometime over the weekend, I dig deeper, find this. End to Torment: A Memoir of Ezra Pound by Hilda Doolittle. There's more on the New Directions page than on Amazon. Evidently, they were to be married, but it fell apart somehow. Somehow, thanks to universal entropy, it always does.

Now these are things I imagine many people already know. People who studied Literature at the University and got their Degrees. I didn't do any of that, but I learned all this in less than three days. And what is more interesting (to me) than what I learned, is the manner in which it came to me. Synchronicity City. No exit. No cure.