Inside-Out Thinking

dark thoughts for a few scattered kindred spirits

You know when you go through a period when metal, mechanical things keep going wrong? When you're blocked in what you want to do, no matter how good-hearted? This is Saturn/Satan, the Spirit of Materialism, stamping his foot, exerting his influence.

What are his weaknesses?  I think a weakness arises when his acolytes arise believe that the head-thinking that arises in our bony caves is the only type of thinking of any value.

We're all familiar with the idea that certain individuals are embodied angels. These are remarkable individuals, with happy, laughing eyes. >>>In many ways, sometimes even just by their presence, they exert a power for good, a power to help humanity evolve.

But what happens if Satan's angels incarnate? Imagine what their eyes would be like. Or his archangels? (There are more archangels than the ones we're familiar with in exoteric teaching.) What if they are already on the street preparing his way? <<<

The initiate who set me on my path once told me something that has haunted me as an image of the evils of censorship and the abuse of authority. He'd been researching the witch craft trials in an area near where he lived. He told me that when alleged witches were executed, they regularly emerged from custody into the public arena wearing bridles that cut into their mouths - because they'd been raped, and the perpetrators wanted to prevent them from crying out.

I'm depressed to hear that Soho's famous drinking club, the Colony is faced with closure. It's a unique place, dingy, poky, smelly, lawless, fantastically drunken - you needed to be drunk to steady the nerves. I once met Francis Bacon there, but i was so drunk I might as well not have done. It's the most holy shrine of British twentieth century art, not just because of Bacon and Freud but also younger artists like Hamblin and Emin. In a museum in Dublin - not the national Gallery, but the civic gallery, as i remember it - they've painstakingly reconstructed Bacon's London muse flat, every drip of dried paint, every yellowing scrap of newspaper or Sunday supplement, every brush in a jam jar, just as he left it, and you can walk right into it inside a glass tunnel, like in an aquarium. I wish someone would finance the same with the Colony.

What i predicted in my article in the Indie on Sunday has already started to happen. One of publishers' biggest customers is on the point of collapse. Sales were down by over 10% across the whole trade before that, but now the situation is much more serious, especially coming at the start of the period that large corporate publishers rely on for most of their revenues. Accountants are swarming over everything.

But what we really need now is love and imagination. The precedent that accountants and sales people naturally lean on will be good for nothing.

I've been coming in to work early to write my blog, before I'm likely to be interrupted, but it's becoming increasingly hard as the pressure on everyone mounts.

I've also started to write something a bit more substantial. No, that's the wrong word, because it's  spectral, phantasmal, mad, hard to work out what really is - perhaps even more than in the case of The Secret History. 

So for good and bad reasons I've decided to step back for a bit. I will post stuff, at least once a month, and  I think there may be some way of alerting regular contributors but in the meantime I'd like to thank those of you who have been with me from the beginning - Al, Nick, Stef, Michael, Leon and String, who's added so much recently. I've found it heart-gladdening to meet a few kindred spirits this way, and, if I may, I'll keep in touch.

Oh and thanks for not mentioning all the typos. What usually happens is that they all leap out at me the moment I've pressed the SAVE button that makes it shimmer on the screen for a short while before disappearing from what's in front of me- and appearing on the blog with my mistakes there for all to see. No doubt that's going to happen now..

the spear of Longinus

When publishing was still publishing I used to like to try to give another chance to writers who had been great but were now lost in the wilderness.

There had been a time in the Sixties when Arnold Wesker was quite seriously talked about as the greatest playwright in the world, the British Ibsen. And Roots is still a great play.The final rant has all the power of Greek tragedy. It speaks to you and tells you to change your life.

Partly also because I much admired the auto of his fellow Angry Young Man, John Osborne, I commissioned Arnold to write his own, which he called As Much As I Dare. There is much to admire in that book, especially his depiction of Jewish life in the East End, so different from the usual trashy stuff.

I don't know why Arnold is so overlooked. Maybe partly because the British narrative-literary tradition is mostly a comic one, and what's great about Arnold is his completely unblinking sincerity.

I went to stay with him in his cottage underneath Hay Bluff, and we had some good walks in that bleak, windy landscape. He told me that when he was feeling depressed that bleakness was a solace.

I'm sure we all recognize the truth of that - like curing like.

It's a part of the esoteric view of the world that this truth works on more than just a psychological level - that it's out there, woven into the physical structure of the cosmos. Materialists want to deny this, because they cannot accept that the cosmos is expressive of human values. If we think it is, they say, we are simply projecting.

That's why they have to deny there's anything in homeopathy, even though millions have personal experience of cures. For them it's a matter of principle.

demons can be a bit thick

There's a fascinating passage in Lorna's book where she describes what it's like for her to meet someone possessed.

The demon in question hides in the victim's chest, but moves slightly to the side and out as Lorna approaches, and as it does so it sniggers. It's congratulating itself on not being noticed..

..and that snigger is what alerts Lorna to its presence! 

sexual love, an altered state

Prompted by Al's brilliant, insightful comment below, I've been trying to think about sexual love, the sexual act as an altered state.

Some of the literature on this subject - a lot of it very hard to find - is among the weirdest esoteric literature I've read - and that makes it pretty weird! I might 'sample' some of it in my next post if i can find it amongst the mouldering piles of books and papers in my shed.

Along with dreaming, sexual ecstasy is a very common altered state, and its esoteric dimensions are commonly overlooked. Making love to someone you are deeply in love surely brings you very close to divinity.

Robert Wyatt evokes this in Sea Song, which is my favourite:

'..but I can't understand the different you in the morning when it's time to play at being human for a while....until your blood runs to meet the next full moon your madness fits in nicely with my own..'

I tried to show in my book  how love of God and love of human for human kept leap frogging each other through history, but, as Al hints in his comment, there is a lot more to say.

little acts

Two young fish swimming along meet an older fish swimming the other way, who says 'Morning boys, how's the water?' The 2 fish swim on and then one looks at the other and says 'What the hell is water?'

This little fable comes from a lecture given by the American writer David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last week.

The lecture was reproduced in yesterday's Guardian, where an excellent commentary by David Tayler says he was part of a group of writers, the most advanced of our generation, that also included Jonathan Franzen and Richard Powers.

Shows how much I know - but I SHOULD know, because the lecture is marvellous and I admire the values of these writers as David Tayler describes them. He says they aim to give postmodernism a human face, taking what's good from high culture and pop culture. They risk being looked own on by the literary mandarins, risking sentimentality, melodrama and overcredulity in the name of promoting human values in as friendly and unpretentious way as possible. They risk attack from cynics and reductivists by addressing the big questions of life and death.

The fish fable caught my attention because it's about some of the things I've tried to write about - things which are so close to our centre of consciousness that we find it hard to focus on them.

His point is that, though we may not be conscious of it, we can't help worshiping something. If we don't worship God or Somesuch, we risk worshiping money, beauty, intelligence. He argues that if you worship money, you'll never had enough, if you worship beauty, you'll end up feeling ugly, if you worship intellect, you'll end up feeling stupid.

He recommends rather 'being able truly to care about other people and sacrifice for them, over and over again in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day'.

For me this raises a question. Why is the universe so constituted that these human values are responded to in this way, for good or for ill?

The implication, surely, is that the universe is not a universe of blind, impersonal forces, but that it has human values written into it. The human values that David Foster Wallace worked to introduce into literature are written in the stars, blowing with the wind.

His phrase quoted above echoes Wordsworth's famous phrase about the best portion of a good man's life  consisting in 'little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love' and St Therese of Lisieux's teachings and example.

My guess, just from reading this short lecture, is that David Foster Wallace shied away from recognizing the religious, supernatural content of his ideas. I hope not. Thinking about this stuff IS dangerous, but sometimes you can make out a light on the other side of the valley.

a touch of stupidity

One of the good sides of my job is getting to meet childhood heroes.

At the age of 13 I was deeply in love with Barbara Windsor, who seemed to embody sex with all the worrying, dark parts taken out. It's easy to forget how beautiful she was in the beginning - all the sexual eclat of Bardot when she first burst on the scene.

Then I remember my sister and i trying to recreate Bob Monkhouse's show The Golden Shot with a toy bow and arrow and a plasticine apple. Years later i heard him on Anthony Clare's radio programme In the Psychiatrist's Chair, talking with almost unforgivable honesty about the suffering his mother had caused him. It was almost on the level of John Osborne's A Better Class of Person in which he wrote about his mother, who was clearly borderline personality disorder.

There's something exhilarating when someone's able to break a taboo like this -and Osborne IS the best writer of rants in English literature since Shakespeare - and when prospective autobiographers ask me which is the one to beat I tell them this one. Complete honesty, if not about others then about yourself, however painful. And try to say something no-one's ever said before.

I know people like Peter Kay and Jimmy Carr really rate him, but Bob Monkhouse not, for me, one of the comedic greats of his generation. He believed he was popular, especially with women, because he was good-looking and not a buffoon, like say Laurel and Hardy. He told me women have to put up with enough buffoonery and uselessness from their menfolk in real life.

He saw himself as a smooth, wise-cracking comedian in the American style, and, of course, a computer's memory for jokes.

But for me he was not as funny as the greats of his generation - Eric Morcambe, Spike Milligan, Tommy Cooper. Not in the same dimension. I think the problem with Bob was that he was too intelligent. You see it in his eyes, the click, click, click, as he registered the response to the present joke and decided which joke to tell next.

He may even have found his own prodigious intelligence uncomfortable. He rang me up in the evenings sometimes, happily drunk. I heard it said he'd drink a bottle of whisky a day. I remember when I started studying philosophy at university my head would be spinning, and I'd get drunk partly just to stop thinking.

The truly great comedians have a touch of stupidity. I think someone said with reference to Dostoyevsky that all geniuses have a touch of stupidity.

Dostoyevsky doesn't have the all-encompassing, all-clarifying universal intelligence of Tolstoy. He doesn't have it all sussed. Dostoyevsky is still enmired in experience he doesn't properly understand - new experience, a new form of consciousness. Not only new  - prophetic. The rising up inside of humanity of dark, even demonic forces.

I fact it's still new, hard to get a perspective on. How many of people reading Dostoevsky today would recognize it as genius if they hadn't been told? 

gremlin in the machine

My home computer keeps losing its connection.I'm going to try posting stuff, but I suppose you may not even get this.

an initiate of Toltec shamanism

has written to me from France, wanting to start an e-mail correspondence on my views on shamanism. Unfortunately the e-mail address is omitted, but maybe this will be a sort of message in a bottle. Someone has also questioned my views on shamanism below.

In conventional history the history of religion is one of pretty steady progress from primitive totemism and animism to the enlightened near-humanism of the modern Church.

From the point of view of idealism, though, the journey has been a bit different. In very early times, before matter and materialism became so dense, humankind had much easier, fuller access to the spirit worlds, to the many different spheres and levels of the spirit worlds. These are the visions remembered, for example, in the paintings and carvings of the temples of Egypt. They have become fainter and fainter though the ages, until they have become, for many people, abstract dogma rather than lived, spiritual experience.

What is perhaps distorting is to take, for example, the Voodoo of Haiti, and use it as a lens to understand this religion of ancient Egypt. This modern practice represents a decline of the once magnificently complex system of the ancients, rather than a true picture of it.

My correspondent  writes that the animal spirits she encounters are most certainly divine and that so-called demons are sometimes sent to test. I have never had a shamanistic experience - though I may be on the promise of one next year - so I shouldn't comment, except to say that this is by no means inconsistent with what I believe. I certainly believe in 'good' animal spirits. As to whether the spirits encountered in shamanism are divine or 'gods', again, I shouldn't try to pronounce. All I'd say is that there MAY be a difference in use of terms here.  In my book a god is the level of archangel or above. 

Lorna's news letter

mentions my last visit.

'We talked of lots of things. One of the things I found so intriguing was watching the Angels all around us listening and commenting among themselves on what was being said...The Angels told me while Mark was over here it was important to bring him to some of the places that I have mentioned in Angels in my Hair. One of the first places I brought him to was the cottage, where I used to live with Joe and the children. I explained to Mark that the area  was now built up and most of the fields are gone, replaced with new houses full of families. To my delight part of the old lane leading up to the cottage still remains as it was long ago with the tall hedging... I felt excited as we walked in the gate of the cottage. I smiled, seeing the Angels standing at the front door. They looked like they were preparing the way for us. I smiled at them. I turned the key in the door and in we went. The Angels followed. I showed Mark round the house, particularly the old part...Sometime later we drove down to the village of Maynooth, parked the car and walked to the College. I showed Mark one of my secret places, a place I visit when I need time for myself. We also visited the beautiful church of St Patrick's College and after that we walked down the avenue of trees, the same path I walked that day when the Angles gave me the feather shortly after Joe's death.'

What a privilege!

Sometimes I think any one - I suppose I'm thinking of humans rather than Angels - would find listening to Lorna and me talking quite comical, as we both speak - and think - so slowly with lots of gaps.

My mother used to have a phrase for me - meant kindly: 'not quite with it'. I see the same thing in my son. It's as if when he begins to speak the thought starts its journey towards the outside world from somewhere hundreds of miles inside his head.

If go mad

I think I'll be one of those madmen who pace the streets all day.

There used to be one in Tunbridge Wells, a primary school teacher who couldn't get work. He wore big boots and a cape to do his walking in. Then there was a very small man who used to pace very fast around Pimlico, never seeming to stop or even slow down. Balding, with thinning white hair and a beard, he  looked like a Hobbit in a hurry.

Reminds me of a comment a friend made, summarizing the first  of the Lord of the Rings films.

'A lot of trudging.'

Sorry to be slow replying to comments this week. Hope i'll catch up on Friday.