I’m very pleased to announce that the first print run of my book War & the Noble Savage has sold out. Instead of reprinting, I’ve decided to make this text more widely available as a free eBook (1.45 MB PDF).

Here’s a sample of the feedback it’s been getting:

War & the Noble Savage approaches its contested subject matter with elegance, wit and a keen critical intellect, and exposes the role of our modern culture wars in our imaginings of the prehistoric past. Its thrilling historical sweep offers a fresh perspective on our chaotically evolving present.

Mike Jay, author of The Atmosphere of Heaven and The Air Loom Gang

An excellent job on a most central topic.

Dale Pendell, author of Pharmako/Poeia

Lucid explanation and intelligent analysis. (8/10)

Fortean Times

It’s licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike license, so feel free to spread it around.

Enjoy!

Well, they dominate anyway in ecological terms… But there’s been a meagre addition to this wider accolade within the insignificant sphere of human culture, as the Pestival—a festival dedicated to insects in art, and the art of being an insect—won the Observer 2010 Ethical Aware for Conservation. Apparently it’s the first time a left-field festival has won this award.

I’m honoured to have helped Pestival by getting their website together, which is well worth checking out as they’ve recently taken on some guest bloggers, including resonant figures such as musician and philosopher-naturalist David Rothenberg, who are over there talking about such things as recordings of oscillations from within insect bodies, and the co-evolution of insects and flowers…

We need to mature into a post-growth adulthood, in which we can find comfort and grace in a long slow recession—otherwise we will be the only species to move from adolescence to senescence with no maturity in between.

Trust Dale Pendell to forge a metaphor that’s both obvious and unexpected… revelatory common sense. Could the maturity of the species, the only alternative to live-fast-die-young, be anything different from the maturity of the individual? A long slow recession…

Damn. Tagged with an irresistable meme. The idea in a nutshell: pick a tune that you imagine suiting your blog as well as Isaac Hayes’ wah-wah classic suits John Shaft emerging from the 1971 New York subway.

I’m not sure I can or would soundtrack the sporadic bits-and-pieces that posting here has degenerated into. So, in honour of my drifty seriousness, and my penchant for protracted oneiric research (a.k.a. staying in bed ’til gone lunchtime), I’ll plump for Coil’s majesterial ‘The Dreamer Is Still Asleep’.

May the Goddess keep us from Single Vision and Newton’s Sleep

My introduction to “magic” was—in my personal mythology at least, which is all you have in personal matters after a certain stretch of time—the RE/Search book on William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Throbbing Gristle. Well, just recently I’ve been introducing someone wonderful to RE/Search books; and the other week it was a pleasure to see V. Vale, the tireless editor and publisher of these seminal volumes, hold forth on Burroughs, Ballard, and the history of RE/Search at Donlon Books in Hackney. So there’s been a little RE/Search revival in my world.

Now, I’ve never considered myself a “magician”. Like any skill or art, someone people are specialists. But my understanding of magic has always been that its particular exclusivity is more an artifact of our repressive culture and religions than something that makes it any more exclusive than, say, painting, or astronomy. There’s always those with an exceptional aptitude, who break new ground and mould the domain more than others. Pretence is probably the real issue, much more of an issue than honest “dabbling”, especially in the outrageous playgrounds for the ego that magic can facilitate.

In any case, while I’ve no special aptitude for magic, I’ve gradually moved past honest dabbling (OK, verging on pretension sometimes), towards something like engaged lay practice—which certainly feels like something that should be open to anyone who is interested in life. But it’s tremendously humbling to read P-Orridge’s definition of magic, which opened certain doors for me nearly 20 years ago, and realize how recently it is that I’ve even started approaching a realization of this definition (which is by no means, ahem, definitive):

I mean, basically what you do is—you have to have a very strong vision and direction. You have to have something that you really focus on that you want to be like, or you want to get to, or a kind of person you want to be. And the kind of things that you want that person to generate in the world. And then you just have to try to maximize the possibility of that happening, by avoiding the things that might distract you from it, or destroy it, or block it. So it’s a kind of removal process, you’re removing everything that’s in the way. So that it becomes more and more likely that you’re going to get it. And if you do or not isn’t the thing; the fact is, you get further to it that way than if you don’t. And you can only do that by not wanting to dictate what happens to yourself. You can’t be in control of that, because you don’t understand all the forces at work. Because everybody in the world and all the forces in the world are affecting your destiny . . .

You see, you have this vision of destiny, and then fate is what actually takes place. A lot of people think they’re the same thing, and they’re not. So what you try to do is—maximize the chances of fate not interfering with you going towards the destiny. And the destiny can actually change, you see, because certain times fate cannot be stopped. And it does deflect you and the vision mutates. You might still think: “I would rather have been that, but I can’t get there, so what’s the most useful thing I can still get to?”

Genesis P-Orridge (my bold emphasis)

As I said, it’s by no means definitive. I once heard a very experienced magician asked what magic was, and I was impressed and intrigued to hear him preface his take on it with the caveat that he tries to give a different definition every time he’s asked. In the domain of the trickster, how else to approach things?

And of course, I’m certainly not trying to hold Genesis up as any kind of guru-esque fount of wisdom. S/He just hit on something important with some good plain English here.

I imagine that to a certain extent I “understood” the slippery but potent hybrid of will and humility that’s expressed here at many other times in the past. Perhaps even the first time I read it. But “initiations” and understandings ebb and flow, and cycle round… And re-reading the above crystallized nicely my recent round of learning.

I look forward to understanding it all again some day.

In 2005 I went to the International Association for the Study of Dreams conference in Berkeley. It was a good excuse to visit the USA for the first time, and the conference itself was fantastic—an inspiring mix of solid dream research and the grassroots enthusiasm that characterizes much contemporary interest in dreams.

Since then, I think all of the IASD conferences have also been in the States. Not very “international”. But next year, they’re coming to Europe: to Rolduc, a former medieval monastery in Kerkrade, the Netherlands. Looks like an interesting venue, and I’m sure being in Europe will ensure a healthy blend of delegates.

I’ve not decided to go yet, but I’m very tempted. Check it out.

Nihilism and enthusiasm can manifest in association with both connectivity and freshness.

There is the nihilism to be found in too many inheritances, the burden of history, a tangled nightmare from which one tries to awake; and there is the nihilism found in isolation, alienation, lack of reference points, the terror of infinity.

There is the enthusiasm to be found in deep connections, multiple correspondences, a heady excess of relationships; and there is the enthusiasm found in an open road, the blue sky, the shedding of the weight of obligations and contact.

Any philosophy of enthusiasm that sides with either connectivity or freshness condemns itself to obvious shadows.

Explosion II by Roy Lichtenstein

Just heard via V. Vale’s RE/Search mailing list of an exciting upcoming exhibition in London, Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard. Running from February 11th to April 1st at the Gagosian Gallery near King’s Cross, this major exhibition celebrates the impact of Ballard’s singular imagination, and of course follows the author’s recent demise.

Drawing on a wide variety of artists populating the Ballardian realms between Surrealism and Pop Art, the exhibition features work by (among others) Francis Bacon, Hans Bellmer, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Salvador Dalí, Eduardo Paolozzi, Andy Warhol, and Ballard himself. Apparently Ballard’s photographs of his own car crash have recently been discovered, and will be on display.

Just a quickie to direct your attention, if it’s not found it already, to enfolding.org. Billed as covering “tantra, history, gender, occulture & other queer assemblies”, it’s a group blog initiated by Phil Hine which is still building gradually, but already there’s some great material over there. Informed by recent academic theory as well as long-term practice, there’s plenty of thoughtful, accessible critiques of well-worn occult mainstays, such as the astral plane and The Golden Bough, a great boundary-melting examination of Baphomet, and oodles of beneath-the-surface thoughts on Tantric history and practice.