It was a long, winding path of coincidences that led me to Naboland. As it should be.

In the spring I had some time to kill in the West End, so I headed to Charing Cross Road to browse the book shops. I hoped to find something interesting for my research into the Pole Star. I remembered at one point that some good stuff had come up when I looked at material surrounding the terrestrial as well as the celestial north pole. So, in the shop where I found myself, I headed to a section I usually pass by: Travel Writing.

There, laid horizontally on top of the books on the very top shelf, only reachable by ladder—appropriately enough—was a book called The Idea of North by Peter Davidson. I knew the phrase from Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights—though, as Davidson is at pains to point out, it originates with Canadian pianist Glenn Gould‘s experimental radio collage from the late ’60s. In any case, Davidson’s book turned out to be a wonderful, evocative study of the allure of northern climes in literature, legend and art.

Cut to the weekend just gone, and I’m in Dundee visiting my friend Caroline. On Saturday, we’re driving through Fife with a rough remit to visit a souterrain and explore, and Caroline notices road signs advertising an arts festival that’s just kicked off in the coastal fishing village of Pittenweem. I’d never heard of it, but Caroline’s enthused, pointing out as we look for parking the large signs bearing numbers outside selected houses.

Pittenweem, it turns out, is a veritable hive of artists, and the festival is basically a chance to wander around the village, in and out of their houses, where living rooms, conservatories, sheds and bedrooms have been temporarily converted into little gallery spaces.

I was only lightly charmed at first—naturally, much of the art is of the rather twee landscapes-for-tourists variety. Coffee and cake segued into a visit to the village’s old hermit’s cave, and then we started hitting some interesting art. Often the impact of the art was secondary to the unique experience of walking through a kitchen, where the artist is messing with some materials and listening to the radio. You exchange some greetings, and wander into their normally private spaces to view their work.

Going in someone’s front door and our their back door, into a series of interconnected back gardens, some bedecked with sculpture, some just ordinary private gardens… It’s a totally unique experience of art that becomes hypnotically greater than the sum of its parts. Especially when you get to the houses on the steep hills, where you end up feeling like you’re wandering through the creatively labyrinthine communal nesting structures of a crossbreed between genteel artists and some bizarre cliff-dwelling creature.

We’d seen a bare fraction of the houses that had been opened up for the day—maybe a dozen, and we’d seen numbers outside houses go up past seventy. We decided to just pass through a couple more on our way back to the car and call it a day.

As I started browsing the art in the next house we went into, I was gripped by a strong sense of familiarity. I quickly realized I was looking at pieces by the artist whose work graces the cover of Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North. I turned to see where Caroline had gone and tell her this, and, following her into a small, cramped room, I got one of the most potent rushes of artistic wonder I’ve had in years…

The artist was German-born Reinhard Behrens, who, it turns out, has lived in Pittenweem for the past thirty years or so. (It turned out that Caroline knew him as a colleague at the University of Dundee’s School of Media Arts & Imaging, where she’s a forensic artist.) While working as an archaeological draughtsman in Turkey in the ’70s, Behrens was stricken with sunstroke. During recovery, he happened across a newspaper article about a collision between a cargo ship and a submarine in the Bosphorus. Reminded of a toy submarine he’d found on the German North Sea coast a year earlier, and beguiled by the name of the cargo ship (“NABOLAND”), the course of his imagination was set.

Since then, he has produced a range of paintings and installations that seek to document Naboland, a fantastical continent apparently lost between Arctic legend and Himalayan fancy. But, thanks to Behrens’ meticulous archaeological illustrations and imaginative coherence, Naboland has grown more and more elusively tangible, through images of ancient rusty cutlery and decaying hunting tools (as seen on the cover of The Idea of North), and reconstructions of the research dwellings of the explorers who had set out to discover more—chiefly the diminutive occupant of the submarine Behrens had found. This little adventurer pops up in otherwise realistic depictions of realms associated with Naboland—Tibetan monasteries, Arctic wastelands, even the canals of Ghent found in Flemish art of the Northern renaissance.

The room I stepped into in Behrens’ house was a staggeringly detailed installation crammed with the tools, finds, and paraphernalia of this explorer. A half-caged bit in the centre contained a desk, with scientific instruments, tiny whisky bottles, endless little trinkets, even a half-size bunk bed slotted in just above and to the side of the study area—everything faded, aged, battered by long use and harsh Arctic conditions.

At one end of the room was shrine-like tall, shallow decorated Buddhist cabinet, opened to display a brown fur coat with a golden lining. This was from Behrens’ installation ‘The Great Yeti Hall’, and the coat purported to be the coat of the last Yeti, the triumphal treasure from an expedition to the Himalayas in search of remnants of Naboland…

Behrens is currently raising funds for an animated short which will “prove the existence of Naboland”.

For more information, visit www.naboland.co.uk.

Anton Ehrenzweig [from The Hidden Order of Art]: “Any creative search, whether for a new image or idea, involves the scrutiny of an often astronomical number of possibilities. The correct choice between them cannot be made by a conscious weighing up of each single possibility cropping up during the search; if attempted it would only lead us astray. A creative search resembles a maze with many nodal points. From each of these points many possible pathways radiate in all directions leading to further crossroads where a new network of high- and by-ways come into view. Each choice would be easy if we could command an aerial view of the entire network of nodal points and radiating pathways still lying ahead. This is never the case. If we could map out the entire way ahead, no further search would be needed. As it is, the creative thinker has to make a decision about his route without having the full information needed for his choice. This dilemma belongs to the essence of creativity.”

And:

If a “last line,” or “conclusion,” occurs to me upon starting to write, I have learned to put it in immediately, so it does not hang before me, a lure, forcing the writing to skew itself in order that this “last line” continues to make sense as such.

I recently returned from a mostly lazy week with the Art Monastery Project in Calvi dell’Umbria, Italy. I met one of its founders, the irrepressible American tenor and theatre director Christopher Fülling, at the Metageum conference last year in Malta, and was fascinated by his attempt, along with his visual artist and synchronized swimmer wife Betsy McCall and a host of other fascinating people, to create a retreat for art production and community in a former Ursuline convent in the rolling hills of Umbria.

The monastery itself, located in the charming town of Calvi, is still in the process of being readied for occupation. Meantime, the project folk have taken to running a gorgeous nearby agriturismo, Casale Santa Brigida (check out the view above).

The tumultuous storm on the night of my arrival—the apparently untypical climax to the previous week’s baking weather—afforded some astonishing panoramas of dark lightning-threaded horizons, and eventually brought us all to the realities of rural living by wiping out the electricity supply with its torrential downpour. In retrospect it also heralded the sundry events that were to thread through the day-to-day of this rural idyll: the delightful sparks of meeting new people in evenings of convivial feasting, and occasional force majeure mishaps.

Everyone seemed to roll with the punches and rise to the occasion—be it a workaday mission to get pasta or a gathering for barbecued local meats—with the kind of panache you might expect from such a bold bunch of pragmatic dreamers.

Marriage seemed to be in the air, suspended as we were between Christopher and Betsy’s spectacular “Atlantean” wedding at Burning Man and their upcoming festivities in Calvi; and two of their friends passing through got engaged on the Santa Brigida terrace before dinner one evening.

The bountiful fig tree provided a culinary bass note for our ever-tasty meals; the burgeoning olive grove around us constantly gestured towards the upcoming olive harvest. Besides the nascent art activities, such on-site manifestations kept in focus the Art Monastery’s integration of ideas of localization and sustainability into its vision. The locals, the Calvese, have welcomed them as one of their own, and they’re aiming to give to the local community the nourishment of their art and performance much as the local soil will nourish their bellies. One of Christopher and Betsy’s old friends who visited recalled his reaction, years ago when their idea for the Art Monastery first came up, of thinking them a little crazy. Of course, such a project needs a healthy dose of madness; but as we watched the global economy begin to crumble during the week I was there, these goals of community and localization stood out as eminently sane.

For the most part I relished immersing myself in a few juicy books. A couple of notable visitors certainly added to things, though.

Medieval song and classical music specialist Wolodymyr Smishkewych (aka Vlad) peformed his reconstruction of part of the Lay of Igor, an old Kievan-Rus epic, playing his swan-headed lute, as part of Calvi’s San Pancrazio festival. I missed the story—the original Slavic being translated in projections into Italian—but Vlad’s performance, dipping into engaging narrative speech and soaring into emotion-laden song, was great.

And it was fantastic to meet journalist and archaeologist Christine Finn. Known for her archaeologically-minded trip through Silicon Valley—the book Artifacts—she’s currently working on a biography of the controversial, poetically-minded archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes. Christine seems to be heading towards the art departments in her academic studies, finding them more amenable to the increasingly creative approach she’s taking to excavating the past; we certainly had enough in common in our attitude to studying archaic cultures to make the brief time she was there nowhere near sufficient to exhaust our connections.

The Art Monastery’s one of the more compelling and promising projects I’ve happened across recently. Any artists or creative, interested people should certainly have a look at how to get involved.

If nothing else, if you’re thinking of taking a break in Italy, I suspect there are few more fascinating venues for sampling rural Italy and international creativity than the beautiful Casale Santa Brigida. Say ciao from me to Pipo (Italian for “goofy”, I hear) and Josie…

Reading this post about the future of publishing, I found a number of interesting, depressing or exciting perceptions flying around like sparks from the clash between it and my current reading of Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Blake biography.

Seizing the means

Of course, the exciting part of it is the web’s promise to cut out the middle men: large publishers and distributors. The author of the post, Aaron Wall, a search engine optimization expert, calls for artists to become publishers (and for publishers to become artists). I’m way ahead of him on that one, editing and publishing my own stuff since before the web. Granted, it’s never been a commercial proposition, but the principle holds: optimism for the future has to include artists and writers seizing the means of production, and technology facilitating their expressions rather than commerce hampering them.

William Blake was way ahead, too, printing (with his tireless wife Catherine) many of his creations, famously pioneering a new print process known as relief etching. He used this technique to print his “illuminated books”, words and images combined on one metal plate.

Blake’s control over the technical means of his creativity was more than just a convenience. He understood the spiritual roots of McLuhan’s “medium is the message” centuries before media studies.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Here, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he rallies the process of relief etching, where acids burn away unprotected parts of the copper printing plate, to stand as a metaphor for the lifting of the veils from our degraded sensual perceptions. But this is almost beyond the realm of metaphor, as his means of conveying his idea is itself symbolic of the idea.

What kind of world does our new media—untouchable, frictionless, both pervasive and ephemeral, empowering and bewildering—convey? Do we want to live there?

Information snacks

The post embeds a brief interview with Cory Doctorow on how to blog effectively, and his advice boils down to: write like a wire service writer. Write like your audience could put your words down after a few seconds, because they probably will. At least, the people that “count” will:

Most people with significant social and/or economic influence have (an equivalent of) attention deficit disorder, caused by an interruption-driven life cluttered with too much content and too little time. People may want to consume relevant bits [...] Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.

I’m more interested than most in nurturing our besieged attention spans; part of my reason for reviving my relationship with print publishing is to encourage more breaks with the flooding rush of information flow, more oxbow lakes of reflective reading, or at least some meanders.

But wasn’t Blake one of the masters of “little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us”? So much so that I’ve no need to throw any at you—most people reading this will have at least a few almost clichéd pithy quotes from his poetry and writing to hand. Scanning a compilation of Blake quotes, it’s astonishing how many they are, how brief they are, and how potent their kick of perceptual reconfiguring is.

Many great thinkers are (or can be) aphoristic thinkers: Nietzsche, Einstein, Lao Tsu, Voltaire, Wittgenstein… Need one mention Jesus? Or Woody Allen?

The closely sustained argument of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death left him in a place where the revelatory infernal corrosives started breaking his language down into exaggerated, non-linear aphorisms, a kind of erudite prose poetry. He quotes McLuhan quoting Francis Bacon:

Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.

Brown goes on to proclaim:

Systematic form attempts to evade the necessity of death in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings in it, and so it remains dead. [...] The rigor is rigor mortis; systems are wooden crosses, Procrustean beds on which the living mind is pinned. Aphorism is the form of death and resurrection: “the form of eternity”.

All of which is a far cry from the kind of disposable blandness that usually results from “best practices” in blog writing! Still, might Blake have found some affinity with the web, with its eagerness for snappy one-liners and aptitude for textual and visual combinations?

What’s missing here is, firstly, the state of the reader, and secondly, the value of thorough reading, even (or especially) of aphoristic writers. Aphorisms, as a kind of pocket poetry of ideas, can compact very sophisticated insights into tiny seeds of expression. For that insight to properly unfold, however, the ground must be receptive—as Jesus taught in his Parable of the Sower. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Luke 8:8) Which of us, hurried into a permanently anxious low-level emergency state, frazzled with caffeine, eager to click the next link or check our inboxes, has ears to hear much at all?

It’s true that the greatness of someone like Nietzsche is that he wasn’t a system-builder. And yet, there are subtly (or not-so-subtly) dangerous misinterpretations lying in wait to prey on anyone who hasn’t surveyed the full scope of his thought. James Hillman’s work is similar. There are core ideas and tendencies, but the experimental nature of this thought leaves an particular arc that unfolds through his career. Apprehending it all doesn’t leave you with a totalized “system”, but it naturally creates a much fuller understanding of his work. My good friend Jim assures me that Gregory Bateson’s eclectic oeuvre is similarly rewarded by a comprehensive reading. Connections between apparently disparate ideas reveal themselves; and one starts seeing that the connections are the point of his worldview.

But who has the time to read all of Nietzsche, Hillman or Bateson? The dark Satanic offices demand their vast share of your life, and our hyperconnected society lets their demands press ever harder.

Art, commerce, democracy

Ackroyd, early on in Blake, contrasts the London prophet with the Romantic poets he’s normally loosely lumped with. He makes much of the fact that, despite “the dark Satanic mills”, Blake didn’t share the Romantics’ aversion to commerce, making his way (just) throughout his life as an engraver.

It’s true that Blake’s life as an artisan, a tradesman, coloured him in ways that differentiate him from, say, Wordsworth and Coleridge. But what colour?

When he returned to London in 1804, after three generally unsuccessful years near the Sussex coast, Blake “was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.” (Quoted in Ackroyd, p. 271) Ackroyd comments:

He is very specific about the period of darkness he has had to undergo, with a duration of twenty years up to this year of 1804. 1784 was the year in which his father died and in which he set up the print-selling business with James Parker in Broad Street. It was the beginning, then, of his life as a tradesman, conducted perhaps in emulation of his dead father.

He saw these two decades, wherein his youthful creativity was constantly restricted by commercial concerns, as time spent “as a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils”.

In the interview with Aaron Wall where I found his post on publishing, Wall is asked what he thinks the net will look like 100 or 200 years from now.

I think the distinction between the web and the real world will be hard to draw, or perhaps non-existent. Communication technologies will keep evolving and information will available readily in whatever format you like, but with well blended ads. It will become nearly impossible to see the difference between ads and content.

This tendency towards intensifying the blend between commerce and art, advertising and communication, is it creating a hybrid culture that transcends both, some utopian marriage? Or is it the bars of the Black Iron Prison becoming invisible, seamless?

Wall states the obvious dynamic of commercial survival:

If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.

The web promises a broad democratization of the supply-demand axis in publishing. But—oodles of pointless and shit websites notwithstanding—I thought the point of cutting out the middlemen was to enable more diversity?* Of course Wall’s goal is to help people be more commercially successful, so I can’t criticize his good advice. It’s just indicative of the growing control that “the consumer” has over their media world. And while I generally champion this control, I can’t help but see its shadow: the death of revelation.

Audiences can’t be ignored. But they should never be obeyed (just as publishers or artists should never be obeyed by their audiences). The artist’s responsibility (which, as Wall noted, is destined to overlap with that of the publisher) is to a certain extent, as David Cronenberg noted, to be irresponsible. Not wilfully or gratuitously; but to challenge, to provoke, to proffer unpalatable truths. To surprise, to lift the veils. If everyone gets exactly what they want, much of value to life will remain unseen, held at bay.

The web may yet be a tool of conviviality, a means to negotiate between the oppressions of both fascism and democracy. Things don’t look too promising. But I am—I hope—still open to surprises and revelations.

I’ll just end by noting one of the final questions in the interview with Aaron Wall:

How much offline reading do you do?

Much less than I would like…

* I realize that for the most part, the move from top-down to bottom-up dictation of media content is a move towards more diversity. I don’t oppose this. The “diversity” I’m talking about (as becomes clear) is diversions from what people immediately want, in a surface, ego, “gimme this” kind of way.

My own most intense experience of creativity was making two short films at college. The artistic construction of meaning in narrative works—using “devices” such as coincidence, visual and linguistic associations, and chance encounters—is taken in the study of such works to be wholly the conscious craft of the artist. Certainly that was the dogma of the degree course I undertook, reflecting rationalist Marxism-driven literary criticism everywhere. And certainly, it’s a good place to start when faced with the complex mysticism of late capitalist image-making, advertising and unconscious propaganda. But my experience of making my first film, in association with my accompanying reading of William Burroughs and my psychedelic experiences, convinced me that something else is at work. The conscious construction of meaning in art, if undertaken with a modicum of sensitivity and enthusiasm, seems to generate a kind of momentum of signification, where your own intended meanings become autonomous, copulating and generating offspring that complexify the whole process beyond anything under your control—often beyond anything within your capabilities.

The intensity of this experience, together with the density of synchronicities that I found surrounding the making of the film in my personal life, decisively shaped my second film. The central idea in this was that the aforementioned “devices” used by narrative artists to shape meaning in their works do not originate in human creativity. Rather, their use in art is a form of realism, if one admits the fact that reality itself uses them in its interactions with our conscious awareness.

Looking up from Wilson’s book at one point, my usual view of the heaving ocean was interrupted by the huge form of a ferry pulling in to harbour at Methana. Something about its sudden appearance, the ferry, the writing on its side, triggered a memory, a memory of a syncronicity. It was something to do with the ferry port in Holyhead, when I was there recently with Jim on our way to move his things to his new home in Dublin (the location, of course, of the “action” of Finnegans Wake). But I just couldn’t place it. I carried on reading.

A few pages later, Wilson starts talking about the traces of the Italian Hermetic philosopher Giordano Bruno in Joyce’s book. He mentions that in Joyce’s day, Dublin had a bookshop called Brown and Nolan, oddly echoing Bruno’s self-given title “Bruno of Nola” (the suburb of Naples where he came from).

All at once it hit me. Around the time we moved out of our flat in London, I had been reading Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition. Having grown up in England in the 1970s with the godawful Nolan Sisters parading their songs around on TV all the time, I had been amused by the way Yates frequently referred to Bruno as “the Nolan”. I’d been chuckling to myself about this as I came out of the Holyhead ferryport terminal building to return to our van when my path had been suddenly crossed by a huge freight truck bearing the company’s name in large letters: NOLAN.

Some kind of wormhole of frivolous meaning had suddenly opened between the harbour of Methana and Holyhead ferryport, pulled into being by my reading Coincidance. Actually, the word “meaning” in these contexts is often misleading. There are probably levels of actual personal meaning that could be dredged out of this web of associations using dream logic; but in the end the real significance of it all is held in the way Wilson spells the title of his book. It’s a playful interaction, with rhythms, patterns and rhymes that act as channels for emotion and thought and pleasure. It’s a dance. And as Alan Watts said, “The meaning and purpose of dancing is the dance.”

A slight aside, my favourite bit in the essay I was reading:

As Joyce’s eye-sight failed, his prose became even more ear-oriented, and Brancusi portrayed him in 1932 as a spiral, symbolizing the inner ear; Joyce’s father, seeing this sketch reproduced in a Dublin newspaper, said drily, “Jim has changed a great deal since moving to Paris.”

I’d pondered my admiration for controversy-monger Jim Goad‘s recently-resurrected post-a-day discipline. Not too deeply, just one of those dangerously fleeting tingles in your brain that whisper, "That sounds like a good idea." I thought, "Hey, it’s the 1st September soon, maybe I could post every day in September?" All sorts of ideas. Writing something for each blog category, rotating through them one by one… Dredging my swampy memories when the present is all-too-parched… Fleshing out some of those mad scribbles in my notebooks…

So I crashed about two hours ago, but got totally absorbed and fired by Eleanor Coppola’s fantastic book on the quasi-legendary Philippine shoot of Apocalypse Now. A thought spilled onto a page in my notebook, and I caught myself. "Do it! Do it now! Join us!" chanted the gnomish hordes who shovel the musings of the vain ceaselessly into the furnaces of the blogosphere… And here I am. It’s not technically 1st September anymore, but you don’t care about that. And I might not post every single day in September—but it’s possible I might not take a dump every day either. Same difference.

So, (draws deep breath, teeters on the edge before leaping) here goes…

Yesterday, Sofia lost her first tooth. . . . She kept calling me, asking me questions: "Does the tooth fairy have blond hair?" "Does she have a crown?" "Why do fairies have crowns?" "Maybe because a kid might think it’s his parents leaving the present."

Finally she went to sleep and I went out to the Chinese grocery store to see what I could find in the way of a surprise.

I’ve not got kids, and I never really had any issue with these little parental myths as a kid—believing them, then realising the truth. But I’ve always been a little dubious about the ethics of lying to kids—the whole Santa Claus thing seems too much like that Christianity codswallop.

But Eleanor Coppola’s vivid little portrait struck me sideways. Isn’t it just like initiation? I’ve never been part of a magickal group, but reading about the process of hoodwinking followed by revelation has always seemed to have its own inalienable logic, a logic that I can map onto my own spontaneous experiences, one that teaches you about life in a way that clear, upfront honesty can’t. The potential for abuse is there, and is surely part of the logic, too. Initiation without risk seems nonsensical.

Without real social initiations, what more intimate, important and powerful initiation is left besides these little parental conjurations? I’m not trying to set anything in stone, least of all any kind of parental structure—but as long as adults are raising kids, these things will probably persist.

There’s the usual gulf between ideal and reality to bear in mind, but surely deceptions like the tooth fairy and Santa implant a real sense of mystery… and pave the way for dis-illusionment. Whether the latter manifests in its mundane sense of disappointment and betrayal, or the more interesting sense of "pulling back the veils"—whether you get the demystification of The Wizard of Oz or the revelation of The Holy Mountain—or really, how healthy the mixture of the two is—depends, I imagine, on the love and creativity of the parents.

I went home and wrapped the package and put it under her pillow. Then I went out to the set to see how Francis was doing. When I came home, Sofia was really excited about the tooth fairy’s visit. She showed me each thing, looking over it carefully. She said, "You know, Mom, I think she was a Filipina fairy with short black hair."

An Interview with ManWoman

by Gyrus

Gyrus: How did the swastika come into your life?

ManWoman: I had no idea that the swastika was sacred. Some of my Polish relatives were in Auschwitz so I had the usual conditioning against it. In 1965 I had a series of spontaneous trance visions in which my soul flew up into the inner source of everything—a radiant light that was extremely ecstatic. It blessed me, it healed me in a profound way. In some of the visions it was a vortex of power. After this the swastika appeared in my dreams and in one very powerful moment a wise old man told me, "Take this symbol as your own and redeem it so that it will strike love in all hearts that behold it." I choked and he marked my throat with a white swastika (which I later had tattooed) using his finger.

Gyrus: I suppose you’re aware of American Indian myths connecting creation with the swastika and the throat. One myth tells of a god who took a bird and whirled it around until it got dizzy and hallucinated everything into existence! And gorgets (worn on the throat) showing four birds emanating from the Centre have been found at Spiro Mound in Oklahoma.

Swastika gorgets found in Oklahoma

Do you connect the swastika with the throat, in terms of the voice, poetry and creation?

ManWoman: The thing that I love is that I wasn’t aware of any of these myths at the time. This stuff all poured out from my depths unlooked for. That story of the bird hallucinating everything into existence makes more sense to me than the Adam and Eve bit. In the Kundalini yogic system the throat is the centre of creativity and self-expression. In my dream the swastika on my throat was to help me speak out for the swastika and to give me courage. The prime quality of the swastika seems to be creativity. In a recent dream I saw the nature of existence as a burning white octopus with a lightbulb of creative idea over his head. On the end of each of his many arms was a being like a dog, a cat, a woman, a man, a gorilla, a bird, a snake, etc. The notion of separation is an illusion as there is only one consciousness creating all the play of this world. And when we see this clearly we can co-create and influence the direction this world takes. If you can get past the prison of your own face, life is swimming molecules waiting to dance with you. My throat was marked with the swastika in about 1968. Now thirty years later I see kids walking around with swastika tattoos. Did I help to create this by my focussed intentions or was I just picking up on an inevitable occurrence with my artist’s visionary antennae?

Gyrus: What are some of the more extreme reactions you’ve got from people in the street? Has there been anyone who just hasn’t been able to see what you’re trying to do in redeeming the swastika symbol?

ManWoman: Sometimes I feel eyes burning into my arms and I look up to see looks of great fear, anger and revulsion on faces. It’s hard to explain yourself to passing strangers in ten words or less so I have to live with this. Although my life is much easier now because the word is spreading—so many of the Swastika Friends are out there now helping me. One time an old man approached me on the street threatening to whack me with his cane and calling me a fascist. I began telling him about the history of the swastika and soon he was using his cane to keep me away as if I was truly crazy. Another time I stopped to pick up a hitchhiker coming back from LA. She looked desperate for a ride but she leapt out of my van screaming, "Nazi, Nazi!" as if she had sat on an electric wire.

One time I was in Fort Worth, Texas and there was a convention of B-52 bomber pilots in the hotel. My wife wanted us to sneak in the back door but I walked boldly into the lobby and by the end of the weekend they were all having their pictures taken with me to prove it to the folks back at home.

The worst episode was on Muscle Beach in Venice, California, when three angry Jewish body builders surrounded me and started screaming. One shoved his gold Hebrew good luck charm in my face and said, "What about my symbol?" I had to do some fast talking. They were surprised when I said I wasn’t anti-semitic. I knew that they wouldn’t believe that the swastika was an ancient Jewish symbol found in synagogues (this is true) so I told them it was a Buddhist symbol and they slowly cooled down. My other Swastika Friends who were with me were amazed when I actually parted friends with the Jews because I was totally candid with them and they believed me. They were only reacting to their conditioning (my charm and my third eye tattoo helped). Soon I will be able to put my book Gentle Swastika into peoples’ hands when these situations come up. At the New York City Tattoo Convention last spring a woman approached me on the street. She said, "You’re awfully brave to be showing your arms in this town. It’s owned by Jews." But what can I do? I’m following the directions of my dreams which have given me quite the adventure in this lifetime. If I don’t speak out, who will?

But there is another side to this. Sometimes people get really ecstatic when we meet and do handstands in the street because they thought they were alone, the only one in the world to be fascinated by the "evil" swastika, and then suddenly they see this defiant guy tattooed with 200 swastikas and a third eye and the light goes on. That’s why Friends of the Swastika is growing so fast—it’s like discovering your lost tribe, like discovering that you aren’t the ugly duckling, a misfit, but a swan, a different more spiritual creature altogether!

Gyrus: Have you tried starting dialogue with representatives of the Jewish community about your work?

ManWoman: Not officially. I met a rabbi in San Francisco who was very intrigued. Quite a few Jews have signed the declaration of independence of the swastika that I started a couple of years ago. One said, "Don’t tell my mother," because he was breaking the chain of conditioning that has perpetuated the hatred of an innocent symbol wrongfully defamed. This was a brave act. And of course I have a lot of Jewish friends who have been challenged during our friendship and now see beyond their tragic past. I haven’t emailed the Jewish Defense League. No point in provoking people. I’m out to re-educate not to be intentionally a shit-disturber. However last fall in Calgary Alberta I had a show and one of the paintings contained a swastika representing the mystical source. Outraged citizens phoned the local JDL president who came over to meet me. He walked into the gallery, looked at the painting and said, "Now that looks more like the old Hindu swastika to me," and I knew right then I could have a dialogue with this man. He told me to call him if anyone gave me static about it. All I ask of Jews is to look at the thousands of years of sacred history of the swastika and to say okay the swastika has another life independent of the second world war. Not everyone using a swastika is anti-semitic. Over half the world’s population still honors it as a sacred sign.

Gyrus: Give us a thumbnail sketch of swastika history.

ManWoman: Okay. It was used for centuries as a symbol of good luck by Greeks, Romans, Celts, Vikings, Christians, Jews, Africans, Mayans, Aztecs, Chinese, Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, Tibetans, Hopi, Cree, and wandering neolithic tribes. To Hell with Hitler!

Gyrus: You held a convention in the town of Swastika in Ontario. How did this town get its name, and what attitude do the citizens have now to the symbol, and what you’re doing?

ManWoman: Two brothers, the Dusty brothers, found gold on that location—tons and tons of gold! One of their girlfriends wore a swastika good luck charm on a pendant around her neck. They named the mine Swastika Mine because of their good fortune. Two years later another gold mine was found and they called it Lucky Cross Mine. Lucky Cross is what the Indians called the swastika. When the town grew up around these mines it was called Swastika, Ontario in 1911. They fought a hard battle during the Second World War because the Canadian government wanted to rename the town Winston to honor Churchill. The towns folk sneaked out at night and changed the signs back to Swastika. They have fought criticism from many people over the years but have kept the name. They made one concession—they did not display the symbol on their store fronts as they did in the past. The citizens like what I’m doing because it takes the heat off them. Many people in Canada have heard my message now and the word is spreading. The town of Swastika has recently started using the swastika symbol on the buttons they wear during their winter games festival.

Gyrus: Some of your artwork is outrageously sexual! Also, you described your initial visionary experiences as being ‘gang-banged by holiness’. A lot of people must have a whole series of cultural barriers to leap before they appreciate your work!

Elvis the Pelvis by ManWoman

ManWoman: Yes, that was a series where I was trying to exorcise the Catholic nineteen fifties sexual hang-ups I inherited and had dragged behind me for years. You can leave church but does it leave you? I called it Smut Therapy where the paintings were the therapy. I was raised on a bully god who was pleased if you were dead from the neck down. He created you imperfect and then was pissed off when you acted imperfect—go figure!

My visionary experiences were of a sweet bride soul ascending up into the ecstatic light—burning up, freed of ego and melting into oneness. But the other aspect, unspoken at the time, was that this plunge of my soul into the void of pure pleasure was just like the plunge of my penis into a juicy vagina and the explosion of my sperm up into the womb of the sacred. Free at last! Whole at last! I knew nothing of the Tantric and was slightly disturbed by the parallel because of all the "god hates sex" I had been taught. Now I could say I’m having sex with god. The whole universe is nothing but fucking, endless cycles of birth, becoming, bliss—billions of vaginas popping out new life. People have sex, animals have sex, plants have sex—and love is at the centre of all. I had to dream up an new incarnation for god. God needs a facelift! Perhaps the audience for my work is still unborn but every generation loves it more than the last.

Gyrus: What are your immediate plans for the Friends of the Swastika network—where do you see it going?

ManWoman: I don’t know. It is growing so fast, I’ll just see where it takes me. I started by myself thirty years ago. Twenty years ago I met Carolyn O’Neil from Swastika, Ontario. Ten years ago there were four of us. Then, after the interview in Modern Primitives by Re/Search of San Francisco in 1989, it built into about fifty friends around the world by snail mail, pen-pal style. Now only six months after putting Friends of the Swastika online I’ve got hundreds of friends all over the world. Some have suggested a membership fee and newsletter. I like it as a grass-roots movement without a lot of organization or control. I’m getting photos and info from all parts of the world such as I did from you when you sent me the photos of the famous Swastika Stone on Ilkley Moor in Yorkshire. It’s a friendship of kindred souls and now that we have a guest book we can all interconnect. I’m not quite sure where it’s going but plenty of enthusiasts are asking to get involved even if that means getting a swastika tattoo or just spreading the word to others. It’s a place where major ignorance needs to be overcome and there’s a certain safety in numbers. I’m not asking anyone to be a martyr. The swastika has a tremendous stigma attached to it. You, yourself, are aiding this cause by interviewing me and I thank you for that.

I just did another interview for the July issue of International Tattoo Art magazine. The Swastika is re-emerging in the alternative pop culture much to the shock of those who are still thinking in the old idiom: in the punk rock world, in the flying saucer cults, in the street gangs, in the renaissance of tattooing that is happening—tribal tattoos like Celtic knots, Maori spirals, the Buddhist seal of perfection. The Declaration of Independence of the Swastika has been signed by many famous artists, poets, tattooers; cool people including Lyle Tuttle, Leo Zulueta, Hanky Panky of Amsterdam, Billy Shire, Charles Gatewood, Spider Webb, Robert Delford Brown, Clayton Patterson, Joe Coleman, Bob Roberts, Steve Bonge, Chris Pfouts, Jonathan Shaw, Jack Rudy and Paul Jeffries. I’m very excited about it! Especially looking back on the dream I had about redeeming the swastika thirty years ago. The time is ripe!

Kirsty’s giving life as a self-employed artist a damned good go, and, as I’m currently quite puzzled about the direction of my own creative impulses, it was interesting to hear about the books that have helped her reconcile the wayward, lateral forces that fuel her art with that infuriatingly mundane world out there. One book, a quite extensive collections of techniques, ideas and processes for keeping creative juices flowing for fun and profit, had a certain discipline at it’s heart. The idea is to spend, say, 15 minutes every day playing around with some form of creativity that isn’t part of your standard array of practices. The author used to spend that time mucking about with a guitar. Gradually, she wanted to learn more, and took lessons… But then, of course, the prime purpose of this discipline was lost. The pure sense of play becomes tainted by ideas about playing music "well" or "properly". She was forced to find another form for her 15 minutes of daily serious dalliance.

Of late, I’ve been doing just this with an old bass guitar that a friend passed on to Jim. No amp, no books, no lessons, just noodling around, getting lost in droney loops, funky rhythms, noise… I’ve always felt I’ve a dearth of musical expressiveness, something both challenged and exaggerated by nearly always having had close friends immersed in sonic creativity. It’s been a true joy to just forget about ability, thoughts of performance, "originality", and the tastes of others, and just play. Maybe it’ll go in some direction, but for now, it’s heartening to have this daily island of directionless exploration validated by some expert after the fact. I recommend the discipline to any creative types out there.

Since reading Wilhelm Reich, and pondering William S. Burroughs’ recollection of Alfred Korzybski telling his lecture audiences, "You think as much with your big toe as with your brain, and probably more effectively"—and, of course, dropping acid—I’ve always seen that consciousness is by no means limited to the space between our ears.

Well, Jolane’s a neuroscientist, and it was amazing to hear the news (to me!) that yes, receptors for neurotransmitters are found in cells throughout the body. I was positively flabbergasted to hear the case of the boy with no brain. More precisely, someone with an IQ of 126, a first class honors degree in mathematics, a pretty normal life, but with an extreme instance of hydrocephalus ("water on the brain") that left him with just a millimetre-thick lining of neurons in his skull and… the rest was just cerebrospinal fluid. Less boggling, but more relevant to acidic perceptions and tantra, is the location of a "second brain", the biggest bunch of nerve cells south of the neck, located in the digestive tract. My gradual, seismic work on unravelling bundles of knotted energy in my belly over the past few years takes on a whole new potential significance.

One synchronicity among the storm that have accompanied this post-Bristol surfing session: there was a recent Guardian article on this precise subject by none other than my mate Mark "Pilko ‘Pilko’ Pilko" Pilkington. Very short, well worth reading.

Finally, browsing Cat’s recent blog posts, I came across one of those net things I usually avoid, but this seemed more interesting than most. The idea is to set all your MP3s on random shuffle, and list the first thirty that are played. I cheated (a little), in that I omitted tracks from the same album. I just don’t trust the "randomness" of media players, they tend to bunch nearby tracks together. Anyways, it’s pretty representative, with the possible exception of David Byrne. I totally love the guy, but I’ve a disproportionate amount of his stuff on my machine due to having access to my Byrne-obsessive flatmate’s CD collection. So, on with the trainspotting…

• ‘The Civil Wars’ by David Byrne (from Feelings)
• ‘Monster’ by Khan (featuring John Spencer, from No Comprendo)
• ‘Don’t Forget Me’ by The Red Hot Chili Peppers (from By The Way)
• ‘Waiting Room’ by Fugazi (from 13 Songs)
• ‘Kettle Whistle’ by Jane’s Addiction (from Kettle Whistle)
• ‘Ain’t No Picnic’ by Minutemen (from Double Nickels On The Dime)
• ‘Hang On To Your Ego’ by The Beach Boys (from Pet Sounds)
• ‘Fast Song’ by Butthole Surfers (from Double Live)
• ‘Don’t Worry About The Government’ by Talking Heads (from Sand In The Vaseline)
• ‘The Trees’ by Tarwater (from Animals, Suns & Atoms)
• ‘Jet Fighter’ by Butthole Surfers (from Weird Revolution)
• ‘Gasoline Man’ (Diesel Mix) by The Young Gods (from the 12-inch, original on TV Sky)
• ‘Sugar Ray’ by The Jesus & Mary Chain (from Honey’s Dead)
• ‘All Wrong’ by Morphine (from Cure For Pain)
• ‘Just Because’ by Jane’s Addiction (from Strays)
• ‘Asuka’ by David Byrne (from The Forest)
• ‘P.R.E.S.S.’ by Atari Teenage Riot (from The Future Of War)
• ‘The Anchor Song’ by Björk (from Debut)
• ‘Two Roads’ by George Nooks (from Shake The Foundations Vol. 2)
• ‘John Finn’s Wife’ by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds (from Henry’s Dream)
• ‘Female Mechanic Now On Duty’ by Sonic Youth (from A Thousand Leaves)
• ‘Philmore’ by Funkadelic (from America Eats Its Young)
• ‘Pop Life’ by Prince (from Around The World In A Day)
• ‘Over Fire Island’ by Brian Eno (from Another Green World)
• ‘The Incredible He Woman’ by Stereolab (from Aluminum Tunes)
• ‘Uzi (Pinky Ring)’ by Wu-Tang Clan (from Iron Flag)
• ‘Time To Get Alone’ by The Beach Boys (from Friends / 20-20)
• ‘Bury The Evidence’ by Tricky (from Blowback)
• ‘Good Morning Beautiful’ by The The (from Mind Bomb)
• ‘Aeroplane’ by The Red Hot Chili Peppers (from One Hot Minute)