Yes, that's it. Step right this way. And no, that's not a typo. Tours. Plural. One leaving every hour. And have been since, well... that's what I've been trying to figure out since
the one I "rolled up" for (wink, nudge, toke-toke) with such enthusiasm, some would say evangelical fervor, circa 1967 -- though I can't, at this nearly four-decade remove, be entirely certain of the year. I
think it's 2005.
You may (or may not) be surprised to learn that not the least of these tours is the one I'm on now, and have been on lo these last six months or so, bouncing hundreds of times daily between HighBeam Research and Amazon, sifting, comparing, correlating, collating, and at some point, gods willing, commenting upon the myriad wonders of the diamonds in the dust that collectively constitute our hidden-in-plain-sight, astounding, often-imitated-never-duplicated world. Step right up.
Is it confusing? You bet. But I'm used to it, having long been convinced that regular massive overdosing on psychedelics in the '60s prepared me, as perhaps nothing else quite could, for a later life of total immersion in the hyperambiguity that is the Internet. If this is confusing to you as well, that's hardly a surprise. It is the nature of the beast. Which is not to suggest the...
Number of the Beast
...which phrase, if you View Source (or however your browser enables you to check the page code), you will see is marked up as "color:#666" -- a rather gray affair all around. However, I reiterate not to suggest Aleister Crowley and his silly necromantic "magick," though Lord only knows, he comes into the story too, at some point, however tangentially. The problem is the story itself, i.e., the elusive, maddening, crazy-making book I've been researching lo these far-too-many years now, which is turning out to look something like a mutant three-way cross between Gravity's Rainbow, the unabridged Columbia Encyclopedia, and the Periodic Table of the Elements, mastermixed in A Beautiful Mind and served up like some unlikely transcultural dim-sum tapas in bloggable bits for your entertainment and possible edification. In sentences, I hasten to add, just like that one, having reached the point, where understanding is superfluous, where sense is secondary, where, you could say, the point is not the point.
And I wonder at times, my darker times to be sure, whether there exists an audience for this sort of thing, wherein the sort of thing it is remains a mystery, a nascent, hesitating poetry groping between vastly distant poles: the pedestrian and unimaginative instrumental rationality of purportedly scientific method vs. a world in which anyone will believe anything at all as long as it sounds sufficiently arcane, "spiritual" (but not religious), and, for extra credit, includes alien UFO-loads of revivified Nazis done up like berserker Norse gods. And -- to return once again to our theme, not that we ever left it -- these mystery tours have been going on for quite some time it seems -- far, far longer than the supersized Mental Marburger Plague that beset California in the mid-1960s.
See, for example, the graphic above right from the cover of The Place of Enchantment: British Occultism and the Culture of the Modern -- which, although published by the University of Chicago, may turn out to be yet more hagiographic cheerleading for The Spooky and its previous generation of psychic Dallas Cowgirls, pom-poms all aflutter. You really can't tell anymore. These people, I tell you, they've penetrated every quarter -- the press of The State University of New York, for instance, is now a major purveyor of new agey transpersonal "psychology" and all manner of esoteric, total -- as far as I can determine -- bullshit.
Now, the purpose of my book, I tell myself hopefully on my less dark days, is to unpack and explicate how all this horse pucky got rolling downhill in the first place. Extrapolating from my own case, I naturally assumed it was too many drugs of the decidedly wrong kind, Nancy's Just-Say-No campaign having been, as it turned out, a bust of different color -- a sort of unintentional #666 gray, just when our onboard teevees were picking up more RGB combinations than was ever thought possible this side of Proxima Centauri. If you catch my drift. Fell on deaf ears, it did. All that business about "you don't need drugs to get high." They meant, of course, to get "high on life," a questionably hybrid concept at best. However, as I once pointed out some years ago: actually, you do need drugs to get high on drugs. Which many of us, at the time, did think to be the fundamental point. I know I betray my age by relating this, but I do remember seeing, personally, with my own eyes, graffitied walls posing the profound philosophical koan -- one that has never been adequately addressed, in my view -- "If acid is the answer, what was the question?"
I tried to solve this one myself for many years, but finally lost the thread and gave up. I no longer take drugs -- or even drink so much as those ridiculous faux beers -- and haven't now for more than two decades. I bet it doesn't even show that did all that and much, oh so much, more for half a lifetime. I mean, does it? To tell the truth, I sometimes worry that it may have affected me in some way, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how. Everything seems fairly normal from here, and I'm pretty much back to the usual 16 million colors. I do want to say, however, that I did not quit taking drugs and drinking so that I might get high on life. I quit to preclude the very real possibility of bumping into harder, more dangerous things. Like walls and other peoples' stereo systems.
The latter is a true story. The stereo belonged to N.O. Brown's son, Tom. It was at a party he invited me to, asking me to "be good" and please not to come blasted on acid (I had a certain rep) because his Dad would be there. I went. Why look at that: his dad was there. There was music. There were women. I tried to dance. Suddenly, the record player (those were Vinyl Days) was approaching at an unbelievable rate of speed. I hit the retro-jets but the G-force was too strong. Then, just like the final scenes of Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point -- arguably the stupidest movie ever made -- pieces of the stereo were going into orbit around my head in psychedelic slo-mo. Wow! Was that ever cool! But Dr. -- everybody called him Nobby -- Brown, was not amused. Horribly embarrassed despite my inebriated state, I tried to leave, but was unsuccessful in this attempt,
mistaking a closet for the exit. Closing the door carefully behind me, I instantly passed out. A second later, or it might have been a week,
someone opened the door and said, "Chris?" I wasn't sure how to answer that one.
Tom said, "I'll never forgive you for coming stoned." I told him I wasn't high on, like, anything; that rather, it was the Everclear someone slipped into the godawful fruit punch he was serving to all these twittering co-eds and tweedy professors and the only way I could even begin to take this nauseatingly chummy academic scene was to drink as much of the stuff as I could humanly manage to force down. "So you see," I explained, "I wasn't tripping," conveniently overlooking my utter destruction of his Home Entertainment Center. True to his word, however, he never forgave me. Oh well. Chalk it up to polymorphous perversity.
The other problem I'm having with my book is the whole notion of linear narrative.
But wait. I'm not done with Norman "N.O", aka "Nobby" Brown yet. You laugh, but I want you to appreciate precisely what I was up against that night. And what I'm still up against today. To with: a world of insufferable tossers!
Bear with me here, OK? This is a longish quote (from an excellent resource, btw, The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism), but do try to get the feel of it, the texture, the sheer blatherosity. I have highlighted in red those terms and phrases that drive me particularly batshit.
Of the works discussed in this group, Norman O. Brown's is the most idiosyncratic, but his vigorous interpretation of Freud remains influential. Brown (b. 1913) wrote two principal contributions to contemporary criticism: Life Against Death (1959) and Love's Body (1966). In Life Against Death he offered a radical interpretation of Freud drawing on classical literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Continental writers of the Freudian Left, especially Wilhelm Reich and Geza Roheim. Brown argued that Freud's importance lay in his depiction, in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), of a universal neurosis; that the institution of repression implied the seemingly permanent human subjugation to a life of illusion and sublimation; that repression was evidenced in the fall from the polymorphous perversity of infantile sexuality through oral, anal, and phallic stages to the tyranny of genital organization [WTF?]; that orthodox academic or clinical interpretations of Freud colluded with the forces of repression by emphasizing the necessity to adapt to societal norms that were by definition sick; and that the only chance for some "way out" of this dilemma was to be found in Freud's metapsychological speculations on Eros and Thanatos, the life and death drives (or libido and Todestrieb).
The "way out" that Brown adumbrates is set forth in Life Against Death's last chapter, "The Resurrection of the Body." There he argues that psychoanalysis must situate itself inside the larger tradition of Occidental and Oriental mysticism, which he valorizes in works of Christian gnosticism, Jewish cabalism, [oh screw it...] Taoism, Boehme, Blake, Rilke, and dissident psychoanalytic theorists. Such a reconceptualization will disclose that the dual drives Freud postulated can themselves be subsumed into one unity; Brown interprets Freud's "oceanic feeling" -- from The Future of an Illusion (1928) -- to denote a desire for union between self and world that, once recovered, can heal the divisions created by repression. (Brown sees repression itself as equiprimordial with the separation of the infant from the mother; hence, the "resurrection of the body" would imply the restoration of that time "before the fall" into repression. In this way he links his "way out" with Christian eschatology.)
I mean...
what!?!?!? No
wonder I blew up the guy's stereo. After all these years, I am finally able to forgive myself.
I might as well have put that whole damn passage in red, so intensely misguided is it, not to mention indefensibly stupid. Just one man's opinion... But no, come to think of it, it's actually not just me. More than one bona-fide, respected psychoanalyst -- both of which Norman O. Brown was most definitely not -- speak of the lasting damage this menage of clueless pontification has wrought on the perception of contemporary psychoanalysis. I'd have to dig through all my books here to find the references, but if memory serves one such view is expressed in Recent Developments in Psychoanalysis: A Critical Evaluation by Morris Eagle, where Herbert Marcuse also comes in for a good drubbing. Another crucial finding -- that there is no "oceanic feeling" or the "primary narcissism" so many blockheaded faux psychologists insist on associating with it -- is reported by the hugely respected (and for good reason) child research wizard, Daniel Stern, in The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology.
This view [i.e., that of the book as a whole] places more emphasis on strategies and problems in attachment when viewing pathology, and it minimizes, even does away with, the need to conceptualize phases of "normal autism," "primary narcissism," and "symbiosis."
Symbiosis btw is a codeword for that old time "oceanic feeling." The sub-rosa agenda by which all these nonexistent concepts continue to thrive despite lack of a lick of evidence is America's mania for self-esteem boosterism
-- the notion that self-esteem is "secondary narcissism" and somehow therefore -- much handwaving typically occurs here -- equals a
second-order nonexistent concept: "healthy narcissism."
It is precisely people like Norman O. Brown -- and an oceanic boatload of harebrained New Agers and "humanistic" so-called psychologists who have foisted this and suchlike pernicious perspectives upon an unsuspecting world that could have done without them, views and viewmongers both. If I could, I'd stagger into all their two-bit stereos and leave them sorting out tubes and transistors till Kingdom Come.
Well, shoot. I seem to have gotten quite carried away here, as I initially intended this to be about Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, the very same who inspired the The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which seeks to honor the worst writing ever written ("It was a dark and stormy night" is a Bulwer-Lytton line), and who wrote a little thing called Vril: The Power of the Coming Race in 1871 (full text here), which had Indiana Jones and a pack of Nazis looking for the Lost Ark over 100 years later in better multiplexes everywhere, and earlier had given the non-fictional counterparts of those Indy Aryans lots of funny ideas -- via the ubiquitous Madame Blavatsky -- about keeping the races in their places. But maybe more about all that next time...
