Spendy liveblogs "Jim Morrison: Secret Teacher of the Occult"

[sus]

Journeys in the Age of Wonder seem to involve really high peaks and really deep abysses, you're either having beach orgies in Tahiti not a care in the world, or you're crawling on your hands and knees retching with a fever that's driving you totally mad as your closest friends one by one snuff out. And then you go back home and you have to stabilize yourself. You have to readjust to a more muted life

At least that's what it was for Joseph Banks on the Endeavour.

Your nervous system goes all haywire from being overstimulated, like Dr Frankenstein in the Shelley novel.

 

[sus]

Faculty X seems cloely linked to Jung's idea of the numinous—an experience that feels sacred or holy somehow, in large part because it's transpersonal—somehow transcends the ego, or the boundaries of the individual; he seems himself in a larger system, the ecology of a family, complex cyclical dynamics through time.

Wilson: "Whenever I am deeply moved by poetry or music or scenery, I realize I'm living in a meaning universe that deserves better of me than the small-minded sloth in which I habitually live. And I suddenly realize the deadliness of this lukewarm commitment that looks as harmless as ivy in a tree. It is systematically robbing me of life, embezzling my purpose and vitality. I must clearly focus on this immense meaning that surrounds me and refuse to forget it; contempotuously reject all smaller meanings that try to persuade me to focus on them instead."

So boredom = distraction = diffusion = sleepwalking. Your energy is your charge is your ability to direct focused attention. But it's always diffusing you have to gather it, plug the leaks. You have to ruthlessly triage cut out all the baggage

 

[sus]

I was reading this interesting essay by Wyndham Lewis on shamanization

And he talks about the trope of how, if strangers are around, or someone is watching, “the spirits don’t come out”

The shaman is very sensitive to the energy flows, the judgments and expectations, the vibrations around him. gets very self-conscious. The walling off in a longhouse or private ceremony is crucial for the shaman to slip into these visionary peak/flow states.

I thought this was interesting

The voices go away

They need something, trust faith receptivity something, to come out

 

[sus]

It's not exactly related but I think it's an important part of these ideas I'm trying to get swirling around

 

[sus]

Also apparently Morrison wrote an undergrad paper on how cinema was heir to alchemy. "Its lineage is entwined from the earliest beginnings with Priests and sorcery, a summoning of phantoms. With, at first, only slight aid of the mirror and fire, men called up dark and secret visits from regions in the buried mind." I'm not sure what to make of this yet. I guess it's partly tapping into dream-logic, the visualization of dreams. Dreams being one of those lunar visionings/imaginings that the occult grounds itself in.

 

[catalog]

Yeah deffo early cinema was considered magic. The legendary story of people watching a train moving towards them in the cinema and ran from it. Thinking it would burst thru

 

[catalog]

Filmmaking is very shaman-y. You create an alternate reality, script it, act it out. Record it. Do it in groups.

 

[catalog]

One last thing re OUTSIDEING that I think is important...

Slavish devotion to any model starts to make it go wrong. This is a bit like what you've said about the spirit hiding if you go look for it.

PKD in VALIS has this concept of enantiodroma:

Enantiodromia

/ɪˌnantɪə(ʊ)ˈdrəʊmɪə,ɛˌnantɪə(ʊ)ˈdrəʊmɪə/

noun
RARE

the tendency of things to change into their opposites, especially as a supposed governing principle of natural cycles and of psychological development.
"the remorseless enantiodromia between good luck and bad"

 

[sus]

Slavish devotion to any model starts to make it go wrong.

Yes that's very good, enantiodromia, great!

 

[catalog]

Let's form a doors covers band? There is actually one playing near me soon, I might go.

The Parish, Huddersfield - The Doors Rising

parishpub.co.uk

 

[catalog]

Wyld is very into the idea of Secret Teachers. Which he got from a guy named Gary Lachman. A book called Secret Teachers of the Western World.

Secret teacher "prefer living in the margins of society where they can be left alone to experience their ecstatic states of cosmic consciousness"

(“There are no books written about cosmic orgasms” –Neal Cassady)

Just an aside on Gary Lachman. I read his book about Trump and thought it was pretty good. Then you find out he used to be in blondie and has written loads of books about esoteric subjects... I've dipped into a few others. It's middlebrow Saturday magazine style writing. Boils a lot of very thick and difficult magical texts into something accessible. He's also done loads of podcasts, was listening to a good one about the brit who broke hung in the UK.

 

[sus]

"the pursuit of the rejected knowledge has been an ongoing rebellious activity in near-constant war with the modern 'notion of acceptable reality'" (Seligmann)

 

[sus]

Wow! He was the bassist for Blondie? That's amazing.

 

[catalog]

I don't know quite what to make of the sun/moon symbolisms

On the one hand the occult is aligned with lunar stuff—Dionysian night vs Apollonian day. Ginsberg: "Follow your inner moonlight / Don't hide the madness."

But so much of the hermetic language is about golden dawns and revelations dawning in the East.

"But, soft! me thinks I scent the morning air"

I think it's essential to consider the two together. Sun maps to fire, moon to water. The balance between the two is what matters.

 

[sus]

A culture tries to apply some goddam hygiene to its epistemology, to its language, but there are losses along the way and then you start noticing them, the social body starts getting sore, and you say, OK "There are more things in heaven and earth [High Modernism] / than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

I guess this ties in with the stuff I was talking about in the Patti Smith meltodown thread:

“There was an archer who was in love with his sister so the archer looked at his sister and he said, All the madness between me n you is real private. But the sister was real scared so she put down her cigarette and married the Sultan.”

The story becomes completely incoherent but I think there's something very interesting about this story, as an unconscious/archetypal arc

There is some private source of pleasure and desire that is illegible to the outside world, to the public. The love between the archer and the sister. And it offers itself to her naturally, fluent and effortless. And she doesn't trust it, doesn't trust her own desire, her own sense of valuing. And she instead gives herself over completely, weds herself to the most public, agreed-upon, legible object possible, the Sultan.

Don't give away the illegible current of felt meaningfulness for some hyperlegible publicly agreedupon source of value. Or it'll ruin your life.

 

[sus]

I think it's essential to consider the two together. Sun maps to fire, moon to water. The balance between the two is what matters.

That seems true but I still want a stable conceptual metaphor for the occult vs the accepted reality, I guess

 

[sus]

OK the next chapter is about Alexandria. Like in Egypt. Which was "a city of sects and gospels" filled with Platonists Pythagoreans Zoroastrians Buddhists Christians Stoics and whackjob indie prophets

But I guess Jim lived for a while in a town called Alexandria in the DC Metro area.

And how he had a kind of whispering nagging feeling, the heterodox always calling to him saying: Something is missing from your straight/square/suburban life. Whispering like a snake saying eat this fruit from the tree of knowledge. (The snake and the fruit being two of the occult's primary symbols)

And how this is tied up with post-WW2 dissatisfaction. Any organism, any complex system, it's at its most adaptive and its most open-minded when its current behavior/paradigm isn't working. So maybe you have atom bombs getting dropped and a quarter billion dead in world wars and you start saying OK how did we get there what fundamental assumptions need to budge

 

[catalog]

That seems true but I still want a stable conceptual metaphor for the occult vs the accepted reality, I guess

Have you read Michael harner? It's a pretty simple distinction he makes: this world vs otherworld

 

[sus]

Have you read Michael harner? It's a pretty simple distinction he makes: this world vs otherworld

No, can you quote/cite?

 

[catalog]

No, can you quote/cite?

Er hang on