I’m slightly concerned that the bomb-makers seem to be following me. I arrived in the UK last year in the middle of the 7/7 bombings, and discovered that some of the bombs may have been manufactured near my old home in the Hyde Park area of Leeds. Now it turns out one of the properties raided last night was very close to my last home, on Forest Road in Walthamstow. Anti-terror squad take note: next time I move, keep a close eye on the Clifton area of Bristol.

Well, it would have been highly peculiar to find bomb factories in Clifton, a bastion of wealthy Englishness. Still, Westbury-on-Trym, the home of the recently arrested 19 year-old “charged with terrorist offences relating to explosive substances”, is a mere three miles away.

I don’t think this has half as much of the “isn’t that weird” synchronistic frisson as I thought it might. I’m kind of getting used to it…

Well, he may not have been employed there. But ever since a Francophile friend pointed out to me that “zizi” is French slang for “willy”, I’ve always wondered about how informed the restaurant Zizzi is regarding the implications of their name. Their spokeswoman was obviously not a comics geek; if she was, she may have heard of Melinda Gebbie‘s first solo work, Fresca Zizis (“fresh cocks” in Italian). She says:

I did news graphics for a while for a 24-hour news station and they couldn’t afford cameramen to cover all the things, so they had three of us sitting in a little room making graphics all day long to go with the stories. And this “fresca zizis” phrase referred to a story that came up that a baker in Rome had been arrested by the police. He had kept his bakery shop open on Sunday, and in the window was a little sign saying “fresca zizis” and underneath were little meringue penises and breasts.

The fact that it’s an Italian food chain here really compels you to ask what they were doing when they came up with the restaurant name. And if they were trying to have a covert laugh – has it rebounded through the grisly workings of fate?

Today I went to cast some offerings into the River Avon as part of some ritual work I’m doing. I eyed my umbrella on the way out, but it seemed like a bright, placid day, so I left it hanging there (rarely a good idea in a West Country winter). Down by the river, I watched from a footbridge as some people walked round the jetty I work on. Some little fish seemed to be jumping in the water; or at least, that’s what it looked like until I saw how prevalent the ripples were…

I held my palm out and felt no drops of rain. Could it really be raining just over there and not here? Indeed, a bank of light drizzle was moving towards me, at such a slow rate that it took about 30 seconds to traverse the 10 feet or so between me and the bank. Noticing that the people I’d seen had moved along, I walked down to my spot.

It started getting a little heavier as I sat there, so after I’d done my thing, I walked off before I started getting drenched. By the time I was walking along the road towards the Clifton suspension bridge, the rain was abating, and had stopped by the time I was walking up the Zig Zag path. A vast rainbow arced over Clifton, from the Observatory on the downs over to the city centre.

It’s happened before for me, this synchronicity between outdoor ritual work and the weather. I suspect it’s common. Sometimes it doesn’t need ritual, it’s just an unfolding interaction between the flow of consciousness and emotion and the elements. Nothing that could be charted to satisfy the scientific urge; even so, something that strikes the attentive mind and heart as stepping out of the private realm in a way that renders terms like “fancy” and “projection” naggingly redundant.

Weather magic, often in the form of the “rain dance”, is one of the more common forms of magic to have penetrated the popular Western imagination. Like love spells, it deals with a system so complex that modern science genuinely seems to have hit the limits of its predictive and manipulative power, leaving it shrouded in a cloak of irreducible mystery, and thus ripe for a magical approach.

But it’s something less specific I’m getting at here; none of my experiences of weather changes accompanying rituals have involved any intent to affect the weather. Rather, the weather seems to have played a role in reflecting the energy of the ritual itself, an affirmative dance between the two.

I once headed to the Badger Stone on Ilkley Moor to offer some blood (my own) to the river goddess Verbeia. My sense was that she was connected somehow to the moors as well as the river, and I decided to petition the goddess herself for help in uncovering the connection. As I approached the stone, rain started to fall. By the time I got there, it became sleety. As the ritual peaked, it started hailing, and the wind from behind me (from the south) became so strong that as I looked at the cup-mark on the stone where I’d dripped blood, hail was hitting the back of my head and creating an intense tunnel effect in my vision. I wound things down, and the hail softened. As I walked away from the stone, the rain stopped altogether.

(I later discovered that the weather was more tightly bound to this ad hoc rite than I suspected. In Scotland, similar cup-marked stones are sites where libations—usually milk—were frequently offered to gruagach, elemental spirits. One rock in Colonsay was called “the well of the south wind”, referring to the power it gave the chief of the MacPhees to summon this wind at will.)

In art, when an expression imputes attributes like feeling and intent to non-human phenomena, it is known as a “pathetic fallacy”. Coined by John Ruskin in an 1856 volume of his Modern Painters, this term has sat in a corner of my mind, ever since it found its way in there in some English lesson, as a withering condemnation of anthropomorphism in general, not just in art. (And no, I couldn’t resist anthropomorphising the term itself.) It’s been an education to look more deeply at it in order to write this.

Even though a certain university’s “glossary of literary theory” bills it as “a term used by John Ruskin to decry the ascription of human attributes, traits, feelings, and so forth to nonhuman objects”, Ruskin himself is less simplistic. As an artistic device, he knows it makes no sense to decry it outright. However, both informed and slightly befuddled by his strong Victorian dualism between intellect and feeling, he distinguishes several classes of poet according to how they are able to negotiate this rather dubious exchange of feeling between the human and the environment:

So, then, we have the three ranks: the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy’s shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower, apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be, that crowd around it.

There’s a certain three-step resonance with one of those hard-to-source Oriental sayings: “Before I studied Zen, a mountain was just a mountain. After I began to study Zen, a mountain was no longer just a mountain. Then, when I completed my studies, the mountain became a mountain again.” The pathetic fallacy is only decried by Ruskin when it’s insincere or when it seems to be overwhelming the poet, i.e. when the emotion involved is either absent or fumbled.

The greatness of a poet depends upon the two faculties, acuteness of feeling, and command of it.

Yet if Ruskin intended to coin a potentially positive, or at least neutral term, why “pathetic”, and why “fallacy”?

In Ruskin’s day, “pathetic” mostly held to its Greek origins in pathos, and meant “relating to the emotions”. The fact that pathos also seems to refer to suffering as well as feeling in general could probably inspire several psychohistorical studies. For now, it’s interesting to note the modern evolution of the word “pathetic“:

Meaning “arousing pity, pitiful” is first recorded 1737. Colloquial sense of “so miserable as to be ridiculous” is attested from 1937.

My Concise Oxford Dictionary (1990) lists it as a “British colloquialism” meaning “miserably inadequate”. It would be glib, but not entirely without grounds, to see here the cumulative influence of the notorious English contempt for strong emotions—nurtured by puritanical religion, science’s lust for impassive “objectivity”, and the Industrial Revolution’s demands on everyday life.

One suspects that despite his obvious intelligence, Ruskin was very much a man of his times, and of his country. While he chose “pathetic” as a technically correct term, his age’s growing distrust of emotional truth and dismissal of animism (outside the patrolled confines of art) found an outlet in his choice of this word, which was carrying more and more negative baggage in the popular mind.

So, why “fallacy”? Simply, Ruskin thought that any feelings, intentions, or other attributes reserved for humans can only be imputed by us to non-human phenomena. Even though the artistic use of this imputation may be praised as the work of genius, it is nevertheless false.

Ramsey Dukes, in S.S.O.T.B.M.E. and elsewhere, has written of the four “cultures”, or modes of apprehending the world: Art, Religion, Science and Magic. To simplify the work of a very subtle writer, he sees them as being discreet, to an extent. They’re not (or needn’t be) in competition with each other: they’re like apples and oranges (and pears and kumquats). However, he does see them as successive reigning principles in a cyclic process, at least in Western culture.

That we have recently been living through a scientific phase needs little debate, and it is clearly Ruskin’s place in the early part of this phase that leads him to use the word “fallacy”. Anthropomorphism is scientifically invalid; so much so, that we may as well drop the “scientifically” bit. Science is “common sense”, the triumphant arbiter of truth itself.

In talking of the classes of poet he feels he has discerned in examining the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin says:

I separate these classes, in order that their character may be clearly understood; but of course they are united each to the other by imperceptible transitions, and the same mind, according to the influences to which it is subjected, passes at different times into the various states. Still, the difference between the great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of alterability. (emphasis in original)

To me this has clear resonance with Dukes’ concept of the magician as one who integrates in himself all four “cultures” (Art, Religion, Science & Magic) or elements (Earth, Air, Fire & Water—but do note that Dukes does not equate particular “cultures” with particular elements). The point is to be flexible.

This emphasis on “alterability”, for me, exists in a certain tension with Ruskin’s final conclusion, which largely amounts to distinguishing between the pathetic fallacy with and without the distancing use of “as if” or “like”—similar to what we’re taught as the difference between a simile and metaphor. For Ruskin, forgoing “as if” testifies to a weakness of character that is unable to resist being engulfed by the emotions that suffuse both the body and the perceived environment.

So much for “alterability”; the lines are clearly drawn, and giving in to the full force of emotions is a one-way trip for morbid romantics.

While science teachers may worry about animism creeping into their lessons, they may not fully appreciate that their fear is not of an alien intruder. Anthropology has taught us that the psyche of Homo sapiens is naturally animist, and fear of animism in modern science is fear of a weakening of the rational structure hastily erected on top of this sturdy baseline granted us by evolution. Only feebly integrated with its psychobiological foundations, it creaks in the wind and bolsters itself with paranoia.

Modern linguistics and philosophy also teaches us that some things that science has been fearful of are actually hard-wired into our foundations:

Metaphor is for most people a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish—a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found, on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By

“Air” and “spirit” are synonymous in most ancient languages, so perhaps it is no surprise that the weather attends to, reflects and participates in our magico-spiritual acts. And in perceiving this as such, in accepting our direct experience of these phenomena, in recognising our rational apprehension of them as an abstracted superimposition—valid only in a limited sense—we connect with what it means to be human.

As we become conscious of the unseen depths that surround us, the inwardness or interiority that we have come to associate with the personal psyche begins to be encountered in the world at large; we feel ourselves enveloped, immersed, caught up within the sensuous world. This breathing landscape is no longer just a passive backdrop against which human history unfolds, but a potentized field of intelligence in which our actions participate.

David Abrams, The Spell of the Sensuous

I wonder where climate change will leave our conception of ourselves and the world?

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’ve just started reading a promising biography of the wide-ranging, often controversial, and certainly neglected Arthur Koestler. The introduction intensifies the impression I had of him as an eclectic, troubled man, with references to alleged rape incidents, and the fact that not only did he commit joint suicide with his wife (which I knew already), but that he did so because he was suffering from a severe illness, while his wife was perfectly healthy. There are hints of controversy around his wife’s consent in this, of which I’ll no doubt discover more towards the end of the book.

I must confess that I have a slightly rosy tint to my image of Koestler, as his book The Roots of Coincidence (along with William Burroughs’ collection of essays The Adding Machine) was one of the interesting founts of stimulating ideas that happened to be in my college library, fuelling my extra-curricula passions that eventually shaped my world.

This bias of affection notwithstanding, I’ve found some of the comments by the biographer, David Cesarani, on Koestler’s childhood slightly annoying. He emphasises Koestler’s predilection for selective memory in his memoirs, one that highlighted the troubled aspects of his childhood in a paradoxically confessional and mythologising self-portrayal "driven by the great autobiographical models of his day, notably Rousseau, Goethe and Nietzsche". As someone who set out to write "a study of Arthur Koestler as a Jew who exemplified the Jewish experience in Europe during the twentieth century", and only later enlarged the scope of his project into a full-blown biography, Cesarani naturally makes much of Koestler’s attempts to downplay his Jewish roots. But he also focuses on his apparently one-dimensional image of his relationship with his mother, which the elder Koestler painted as being one of "unmitigated resentment".

He may have come to hate his mother in adult life, but there are many indications that, like most children, he once loved her as much as he raged against her. The bleak portrait of their relationship was exaggerated to explain and justify his less endearing personal characteristics.

I’ve not read enough about these characteristics to make a rounded judgement, but ultimately my point would be, could I ever make a fully rounded judgement? Cesarani seems to feel that his (admittedly extensive) research qualifies him to do so; but when I glance at the shocking disparity between even the most intimate written accounts of events and feelings I’ve been party to, by myself and others, and the actual realities as experienced, I become as cynical about the authority of biographies as Cesarani is about the authority of Koestler’s autobiography.

The biography implies, probably as a necessary evil, the idea that a linear narrative can help us "understand" a person. A good biography naturally paints a multi-dimensional image of its subject; but it can only barely describe the infinitely complex inter-relations between these dimensions, relations that spiral into paradox as life unfolds, faults becoming assets, virtues degenerating into traps, round and round, all constantly remodelling and revising memory and identity. Cesarani provides documentary evidence of Koestler’s early, later neglected love for his mother, such as fond letters berating her for not writing more often. But he neglects any concession to the textures of these memories to Koestler, concentrating on the "outer" significance of the documents to his own eyes. While I’ve no doubt that Koestler, maybe more than most, mythologised himself, this mythologising, in line with academic tradition, is neatly sectioned off from the emotional realities of Koestler’s inner life, and the complex interplay between myth and reality is neglected in favour of an ostensibly neutral, "objective" spirit of gentle but firm debunking.

When he was four or five he was subjected to a brutal tonsillectomy. It was performed without advance warning and without anaesthetic. While his parents watched in horror he was strapped to a chair. Then, once they were bundled out of the room, the bloody assault commenced. Koestler never forgot the experience. Many years later he wrote with undiminished anguish: ‘These moments of utter loneliness, abandoned by my parents, in the clutches of a hostile and malign power, filled me with a kind of cosmic terror.’

Even this unarguably traumatic memory doesn’t escape critical scrutiny:

[H]is interpretation of other childhood incidents also seems tailored to prefigure his future life story. For example, it seems more likely that he retrospectively attributed to his horrendous tonsillectomy the capacity to empathise with the victims of violence and terror. It helped justify what some critics considered to be a perverse fascination with torture. In like manner, the rather precocious realisation that secure existence was always shadowed by another, threatening world, is more probably an ex post facto reading. The notion of worlds existing in parallel is a concept that accorded with his later speculations on the paranormal.

In addition to the rather patronising view of the conceptions children are capable of forming, even in the face of extreme violence, this view strikes me as dismally simplistic and cold. Koestler’s life is stretched along a line, pinned down, his childhood horror only contactable by his adult self via some cynical need to rationalise a "perverse fascination with torture"—the origin of which, as Koestler’s supposedly "psychologically deterministic" view is dismissed, is rendered rather mysterious. And Koestler’s experience of the "paranormal" is treated with implicit academic disdain; as it only emerged with force in his work late in life, it is seen as temporally isolated, projected back into his personal history to justify his present interests. Again, the pendulum swings all the way back from Koestler’s perceived psychoanalytic over-emphasis on the impact of childhood experience, to a linear, one-dimensional view that this interest in the paranormal just ‘pops up’ at a certain point in life. The author is plainly blind to the fact that initiation—formal or otherwise—into "magical" perceptions, especially synchronicity and its variations through time, space and memory, reconfigures basic ontology into radically different forms than that of the biographer.

When I asked magician Dave Lee about early experiences that led him towards the occult, he said, "The older I get, and the more experienced in magick I get, the more experiences there seem to be in the past. It’s as if history comes into focus." Anyone who has disciplined themselves to keep their magical perceptions working knows this dynamic, where the present unfolds the past, perpetually reforging the self. Like most such magical dynamics, it’s a bit "dodgy"—truth and illusion mix therein, and only painful trials and a keen mind can help navigate the mixture. It’s certainly not the fault of any biographer that they can’t capture this process definitively in writing; and perhaps even admitting it into the scope of biography, however good the intentions of the writer, would unravel the fabric of this interesting but dubious genre beyond manageability. Maybe only artistic impressions of a life can touch these mysteries of memory and identity.

Anyways, via web software hero Nick Bradbury, I just came across an interesting post-Sun interview with Joy. It might seem arbitrary to some for an interview to veer between critiquing computer networking and operating software, and assessing the dangers to our species’ future. Well, Joy’s the person to read first if you’ve not made the frightening conceptual leap to the point where these two issues start overlapping—he probably knows more than anyone about the former, and seems to know more than most about the latter. He’s got a book out soon, probably worth checking out: The Future Doesn’t Need Us.

Also via Nick’s blog, a related deep-tech piece from AI pioneer Ray Kurzweil.

Leftfield music journo Simon Reynolds recently mapped his fellow music-obsessive bloggers to proggy bands and artists. My old occultural mucker John Eden got (respectfully, it seems) paired off with Hawkwind. Cue loads of "re-assessing Hawkwind" bits and pieces (for those into Hawkwind—I’m pretty agnostic on them), some of it spawning an interesting little re-conceptualisation of the 60′s.

Which brings me in a roundabout kind of way to my object of interest here: someone else who bothers to mention that trans-Freudian brain-bending scholar Norman O. Brown. I got into this guy via the same route that brought this mention into Reynolds’ blog: Theodore Roszak’s sober, fascinating analysis of the 60′s, Making of a Counter Culture. Yes, Brown’s Life Against Death was a huge influence on Jim Morrison, probably more than he admitted and most people are willing to acknowledge. I was thinking about this recently, getting into Brain Donor‘s Too Freud To Rock ‘N’ Roll, Too Jung To Die. Sure, Sigmund himself was probably a stuffy bookworm, coke habit notwithstanding. But the shit he unearthed—what we usually refer to with the word "Freud"—came from psychological seams that fuel rock ‘n’ roll. Talk about angst… And the song so commonly hailed as the rock song that it’s probably terribly uncool to big it up these days, ‘The End’—it don’t get more Freudian than that. The only thing that comes to mind as getting close is from Copey himself: the blinding Jehovahkill.

Rock thrives on Oedipal fury, and Norman O. Brown gave Freud’s work the sharp, radical spin it needed to influence rock stars themselves. Check out Brown’s ‘sequel’, too, the more scholarly and more poetic Love’s Body (1966). His third book in this series, Apocalypse And/Or Metamorphosis (1992) doesn’t even live up to its title; if you want more, rather grab his great little classical trickster treatise, Hermes The Thief (1947).

And finally… I just got one of the strangest emails I’ve ever received:

I have recently acquired a pony named ‘Gyrus Justice’. He is a five year old imported Irish (Connemara). Trying to find out a little about why and perhaps who he is named for….what does it all mean??? Any ideas? Jennifer in the U.S.

It seemed obvious that the pony had nothing to do with me (I sense more on the background to my chosen epithet soon…); but equally, why name an animal after "any of the prominent, rounded, elevated convolutions on the surfaces of the cerebral hemispheres"? Let alone tag the word "justice" on the end…

It all got even stranger when I recalled that almost exactly 5 years ago, I was actually on a short hitching & camping jaunt down in beautiful West Cork. I had lifts from a few great people on the way (though that hardly made it a notable Irish trip). Who knows, maybe one of them got home that day and named their new-born Connemara pony after the strange guy they gave a lift to? And felt that I had been unjustly treated in some way, and wanted to advertise my plight…? Well, now it seems that news of my plight has reached the USA. Maybe I’ll get something done about it now, I’ve had bugger all luck with the UN.

(Illuminati theorists may wish to note: the period of 5 years; the sum of the current year’s numerals (2003) also being 5; my age this year being 32; and the fact that the Connemara Breeders Society was founded in 1923…)