Inside-Out Thinking

Esoteric cinema - the Great Lynch

There's block of flats I visit lunchtimes maybe twice a week for the gym. Called Dolphin Square, it has a slightly strange atmosphere, inhabited by rich, rootless people from different parts of the world. You can't help wondering how they came by their money and what they do all day. I think Princess Margaret had a flat there for a while. AN Wilson captured it perfectly in his first novel, The Sweets of Pimlico.

Lately I've been surprised to see Britain's bluest comedian, Roy 'Chubby' Brown (whey-hey-hey!) emerging from the gates and also the edgy, disconcerting actor David Warner. He's famous for his Shakespeare and surreal 60s stuff like Morgan, a Suitable Case for Treatment, but he's been on my mind because I've been watching series 2 of Twin Peaks.

He plays Thomas Eckhart. Is this an allusion to Meister Eckhart, the great Zen Master of Christian Theology, famous for mind-bendings such as:

God is within, we are without

and

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing...?

In the UK you can only get Twin Peaks series 2 to work on your machine as a Dutch import, switching it back to English language - but it's worth it.

I think maybe Tarkovsky is the greatest esoteric film-maker - another major artist much influenced by Steiner. His Mirror has what i think is the modern art's most powerful, numinous image of the great world-weaving thoughts that also weave through our minds. He shows great winds moulding the landscape - an image David Lynch repeatedly alludes to, showing the winds bending the trees around Twin Peaks to their will.

I think I've worked out that you should watch the feature film Fire, WaLK wITH mE, half way through TV series two.It then sheds light on a lot of things you've recently seen that otherwise don't make sense. In the middle of the second series the great mystery of Twin Peaks seems to be solved and Laura's Palmer's killer dies..

And then it's as if David Lynch loses interest for a bit. The following episodes are written and directed by other people, and seems to descend into whimsy. But the Log Lady's intro to the third from last episode is one of the clearest ever expositions of esoteric philosophy..

There are clues everywhere, all around us. But the puzzle-maker is clever. The clues, although surrounding us, are somehow mistaken for something else, and the something else, we call our world. Our world is a magical smoke screen. How should we interpret the happy song of the meadow lark or the robust flavour of a wild strawberry?

Is the wild strawberry an allusion to Bergman's Wild Strawberries?

The last episode of series 2 IS directed by David Lynch himself. I found it much more frightening than any conventional horror film, perhaps because of it's genuinely philosophical underpinning. It makes a difference that this isn't cynical exploitation. Lynch believes that he is telling the truth.

There are some thoughts you must never let in

no matter how hard they knock

The Year of Magical Thinking

'You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The details will be different but it will happen to you.'

Joan Didion

'You think you know who you are. You have no idea.'

Matt Dillon in Crash

I'll Come to You, and More Remarkable People

The night before last BBC 4 gave Jonathan Miller's dramatization of MR James's ghost story Whistle and I'll Come to You a rare screening. (It is available on a BFI DVD, but is very expensive).

It's an exceptionally powerful portrayal of the scientific-materialist world-view under attack. As in my account of Freud, the professor who unwittingly summons up a malignant spirit is a man who wants to promote the scientific-materialist world-view. But he's stretching things too far in his attempts to make them fit, and they snap back at him in a terrifying way.

I've never met Jonathan Miller, but I did get to know Peter Cook. He was not, in so far as I know, interested in esoteric philosophy, but he did change the consciousness of a generation. Before PC British humour was men in suits telling formulaic jokes. After PC it became much more sophisticated and subversive, making the audience complicit in multiplying, self-reflecting ironies.

The first time i lunched him, I'd been pressing him by letter to write his auto. He arrived late, already a little drunk, I suspect, and he shoved an old fashioned school exercise book at me across the table. 'Look, Mark, I've already started'.

I eagerly opened it up. There were just four lines. 'Is that it?' I said.

He said 'I thought we could flesh it out with pictures.'

Many professional comedians I've known are on a big loop tape, forever circulating the same material offstage as much as on it. Peter Cook minted new material all the time, and the spirit of his humour is to be found everywhere in England from TV sketch shows to the templates of Private Eye.

This man had palpable 'soul force'. Everywhere he went he was planting seeds that changed thought, making it less rigid, more free-flowing, subtle and inventive. Remarkable people have soul force in different ways, not all of them good. A colleague of mine worked with Robert Maxwell, and told me that if Maxwell walked into a room behind you, even if you couldn't see or hear his booming voice, his mere presence would hit you on the back of the head like a clout.

Esoteric philosophy offers different theories on how people come to have these different types of soul force. it's part of the process of becoming more aware of the way that the supernatural works in our lives, of working with it, rather than against it - like the professor pursued by a malignant spirit.

Lost on a Desert Island

Writers steeped in esoteric lore have often set their stories on an island on which their characters are marooned - from Swift to William Golding in Lord of the Flies. Ostensibly these stories are about how exotic life is on the island, but, of course, the underlying thrust is that life on these islands is exactly like our day to day lives here and now. These esoteric writers are trying to highlight aspects of our lives that normally get overlooked.

The central conflict in Lost is between Jack, the man of science, and Locke who calls himself 'a man of faith'. But Locke's is clearly not the faith of a 'two up two down missionary position' Christian. Locke is exploring the deeper laws that describe supernatural patterns in our lives - laws that have long been the focus of esoteric thought.

Me on Brightcove

My recent interview with Nina Sebastiane is now available online, so I thought I would try and post it here. I do hope it is of interest!

The Secret History of LOST, and other stories

The Secret History of the World shows how many of the great writers have secretly been steeped in a philosophy that is sometimes called arcane or esoteric. Some of them have used their writing to inculcate in their readers an upside-down inside-out, other way round of thinking that subverts the conventional, common-sensical ways of thinking that issues from scientific materialism. As The Secret History... shows, these writers have included Rabelais, Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll.

In fact my book shows that traces, symbols, codes have been left in the world all around us - in public buildings and monuments, churches, famous paintings, music, in the names of the days of the week, fairy stories and many other surprising places.

The secret philosophy also lies at the dark heart of the TV series Lost - as I shall explain more fully in a post soon. Locke, Jack, Sawyer, Hurley and the others are acting according to a code that can also be found, for example, in Gulliver's Travels, The Wizard of Oz, Mary Poppins and Lord of the Flies.

And when it comes to the secret philosophy all these writers - Swift, Baum, Travers and Golding knew very well what they were talking about...