Chasing revolution: drifting through time, space and Eastern Europe (part one)

Introduction

Drifting: 3. To move leisurely or sporadically from place to place, especially without purpose or regular employment: a day laborer, drifting from town to town.

Oxford English Dictionary

 

Reminiscences, even extensive ones, do not always amount to an autobiography. [...] For even if months and years appear here, it is in the form they have in the moment of recollection. This strange form—it may be called fleeting or eternal—is in neither case the stuff that life is made of.
Benjamin, Walter. A Berlin Chronicle. 1932.

 

Bulgaria 1989

Setting the scene

It’s probably a contradiction in terms but I’ve always been good at drifting. Not in a sophisticated Guy Debord, Derive way, nor in a Clint Eastwood High Plains Drifter style and not even in a Jack Black[1] hobo manner. Instead, my drifting was just an antidote to making any hard decisions and is probably part of my DNA. I drifted through school from one thing to another, then from job to job, then to university and, decades later, even 11,000 km across the world.  And through my aptitude for drifting is how I came to travel around Eastern Europe for 6 months with my then girlfriend, Sheela.[2]

Witches and the rise of capitalism

I'm posting a review of this very interesting looking book, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, (published in 2004), as I found it quite fascinating. A frre download of is available here. I'm not entirely convinced by the thesis that both reviewer and author put forward but is well worth reading anyway and provides a number of useful insights. Once again, it shows that there isn't and probably never will be, a definitive account of all the factors that intermingled in the growth of capitalism. It also shows for me, the dangers of a simplistic reduction of capitalism in our own day to the purely economic.

Who Were the Witches? – Patriarchal Terror and the Creation of Capitalism by Alex Knight

November 5, 2009

 Alex Knight
November 5, 2009
This Halloween season, there is no book I could recommend more highly than Silvia Federici’s brilliant Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia 2004), which tells the dark saga of the Witch Hunt that consumed Europe for more than 200 years. In uncovering this forgotten history, Federici exposes the origins of capitalism in the heightened oppression of workers (represented by Shakespeare’s character Caliban), and most strikingly, in the brutal subjugation of women. She also brings to light the enormous and colorful European peasant movements that fought against the injustices of their time, connecting their defeat to the imposition of a new patriarchal order that divided male from female workers. Today, as more and more people question the usefulness of a capitalist system that has thrown the world into crisis, Caliban and the Witch stands out as essential reading for unmasking the shocking violence and inequality that capitalism has relied upon from its very creation.

C. G. Jung

A short article from Fortean Times, looking at C. G. Jung's more mystical side that fits in with the article I've just posted.

The Occult World of CG Jung

How a near-death experience transformed the psychologist's attitude to the world of mysticism and magic

The "Sage of Küsnacht".
Getty Images / Central Press

FT265
On 11 February 1944, the 68-year-old Carl Gustav Jung – then the world’s most renowned living psychologist – slipped on some ice and broke his fibula. Ten days later, in hospital, he suffered a myocardial infarction caused by embolisms from his immobilised leg. Treated with oxygen and camphor, he lost consciousness and had what seems to have been a near-death and out-of-the-body experience – or, depending on your perspective, delirium. He found himself floating 1,000 miles above the Earth. Seas and continents shimmered in blue light and Jung could make out the Arabian desert and snow-tipped Himalayas. He felt he was about to leave orbit, but then, turning to the south, a huge black monolith came into view. It was a kind of temple, and at the entrance Jung saw a Hindu sitting in a lotus pos­ition. Within, innumerable candles flickered, and he felt that the “whole phantasmagoria of earthly existence” was being stripped away. It wasn’t pleasant, and what remained was an “essential Jung”, the core of his experiences.

Into the world of the other (Part one)

Into the world of the other

Tiny Cracks (3)

Faun

 

In the second part of Tiny Cracks, I looked at conspiracy theories and noted that in polite liberal society, admittance that there are real conspiracies is tantamount to whipping your todger out at the dinner table. Only one thing is worse than talking about conspiracies and that is talking about the supernatural. I don’t actually like that term nor ‘paranormal’. Generally, the former is used by those who disparage the concept and the latter by those who tend to believe in it.

 

I don’t fit into either category and prefer to use the term, ‘Fortean’, named after Charles Fort. Fort was a philosopher who collected thousands of scraps of newspaper cuttings of anomalous events; events that made no sense in conventional terms but were what he called ‘damned data’.

Surrealism in the service of the revolution

Posting a link here to the famous issue of Radical America, Surrealism in the service of the revolution. Some great pieces included in it.

Hallucinating reality?

This article by Paul Devereux, from the Daily Grail examines the nature of reality by looking at the nature of hallucinations. It fits in nicely with the recent Guardian article I reposted on uncertainty as hallucinations are at the cusp between the real and un real. Devereux has written a huge amount of very thought provoking material over 40 years or so that focus specifically on the nature of reality, time and consciousness. His website is here.

I’ve been reading Oliver Sacks’ recent book, Hallucinations, and it is jaw-dropping to learn what incredible sights and sounds (not to mention touch and smell) the human brain (or is it mind?) can conjure up.¹ He describes the hallucinations people have had as a result of various illnesses and serious medical conditions like Parkinsonism, drugs both recreational and medicinal, brain damage, sensory deprivation, and several other circumstances. (Sacks notes that it wasn’t realised for years that some medical conditions often caused hallucinations in patients because of people’s reticence in letting anyone know they were “seeing things” in case they were diagnosed as being mad.) The book set me thinking about the whole matter of hallucinations, their nature and implications, and prompted memories of my own occasional hallucinatory encounters over the years. I share my musings here for anyone who might be interested, starting with a few descriptions of my hallucinations.

Synchronicities

By 'coincidence', I just remembered this article by Robert Anton Wilson, also from Fortean Times that looks at synchronicities associated with the number 23.

The 23 Phenomenon

Robert Anton Wilson

Author: Robert Anton Wilson

With the release of movie The Number 23 earlier this year we paid tribute to the late, much lamented Robert Anton Wilson by reprinting this 1977 article from (you guessed it) Fortean Times 23...

By Robert Anton Wilson

May 2007

I first heard of the 23 enigma from William S Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, Nova Express, etc. According to Burroughs, he had known a certain Captain Clark, around 1960 in Tangier, who once bragged that he had been sailing 23 years without an accident. That very day, Clark’s ship had an accident that killed him and everybody else aboard. Furthermore, while Burroughs was thinking about this crude example of the irony of the gods that evening, a bulletin on the radio announced the crash of an airliner in Florida, USA. The pilot was another captain Clark and the flight was Flight 23.

Burroughs began collecting odd 23s after this gruesome synchronicity, and after 1965 I also began collecting them. Many of my weird 23s were incorporated into the trilogy Illuminatus! which I wrote in collaboration with Robert J Shea in 1969–1971. I will mention only a few of them here, to give a flavour to those benighted souls who haven’t read Illuminatus! yet:

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The woeful lack of original content on the blog is still being caused by a long and miserable bout of bronchitis, as well as a number of bizarre incidents such as my car being impounded by the police. I am currently writing something that will be up next week, forces of nature and the state allowing, but to fill the gap is an article from Robert Guffey, taken from Fortean Times but actually an extract from his book, Cryptoscatology.
The article looks at synchronicity which is something that perpetually fascinates me; especially the nature of 'meaningless' coincidences which often proliferate in my life.

Cryptoscatology

Robert Guffey explores the hidden links between Charles Fort and Andre Breton, visionaries at the margins of consensus reality whose subversive synchronistic and surreal practice resonates to this day

By Robert Guffey

March 2012

FT286

 

In 1919, a “meaningful coincidence” occurred: Charles Fort published The Book of the Damned and the surrealist André Breton (right) founded an anti-literary review titled Littérature. The work of both men would eventually inspire large groups of artists, philosophers, and other strange people to follow in their respective footsteps. In Breton’s case, this is exactly the result he had been striving toward. Fort, on the other hand, couldn’t have cared less. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to note that both men – one in Europe, the other in America – were eagerly exploring the hidden realm of dreams, unexplained phenomena, and what the Swiss psychologist Jung would call “meaningful coincidences”.

 

It is well known that the surrealists were heavily influenced by psychology, particularly the work of Freud. Later, they would also draw upon the findings of Freud’s student Jung, whose theories concerning synchronicity dovetailed with their own mystical outlook on life. Jung developed the term “synchronicity” after noticing that both he and his patients had experienced an uncanny number of coincidences that clearly went beyond the mere forces of chance (see FT171:42–47; 264:40–45). For example, Jung once related the eerie incident of having suddenly woken up in the middle of the night convinced that someone had just entered his hotel room, only to find himself alone in the dark. He was certain he had been roused forth by “a feeling of dull pain as if something had struck his forehead and the back of his skull”, and yet there was no evidence of physical harm anywhere on his body. The mystery deepened the very next day when he discovered that not only had a patient of his shot himself through the forehead, but that the bullet had “lodged at the back wall of the skull”. Inevitably, the time of the tragedy coincided with Jung’s fearful experience from the night before (1).

Lost time or...

I wonder how scientists would explain this story I'm reposting below from the Ghost Theory website. I had a similar experience that I will post one day for which I have no 'rational' explanation whatsoever. This type of story fascinates me, with all the caveats about hoaxes etc because it suggests that our reality isn't always as it appears.

Lost Time Or Slip Into Parallel Universe?

It’s not often that I do two stories from MUFON in the same week, let alone the same month, but when a read the story below, I couldn’t resist.
This one has all sorts of possibilities from alien abduction to passing through a portal into an alternate existence. Of course there’s always the mundane and more realistic possibility that nothing of the sort happened, but it’s definitely a strange one.

Loving uncertainty...

This is an interesting article from the Guardian that touches on some of the themes that interest me. I would say however, that it is scientists who have put forward the view that 'science' reveals certainties rather than the general public.

 

We must learn to love uncertainty and failure, say leading thinkers

by Alok Jha, from the guardian

 

 

Planet's biggest brains answer this year's Edge question: 'What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit.

 

 

Edge of reason: Doubt and uncertainty are essential elements of the scientific process. Photograph: Getty Images

Being comfortable with uncertainty, knowing the limits of what science can tell us, and understanding the worth of failure are all valuable tools that would improve people's lives, according to some of the world's leading thinkers.
The ideas were submitted as part of an annual exercise by the web magazine Edge, which invites scientists, philosophers and artists to opine on a major question of the moment. This year it was, "What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?"
The magazine called for "shorthand abstractions" – a way of encapsulating an idea or scientific concept into a short description that could be used as a component of bigger questions. The responses were published online today.

Blame it on the bronchitis

The lack of activity on the blog is due to my succumbing to a nasty bout of bronchitis. The bottom picture is probably what mine looks like.