"Now, what I've yet to puzzle out, myself, is if there is any connection at all between ethics and reality...” - Agent 139. Trotsky had an answer to that one, guys.
Yes, I got Join my cult! for Christmas. I believe that this book is after me. The number of synchronicities in the first five chapters alone just about blew my brains out (after the reference to ELP I was looking over my shoulder wondering whether someone had "customised" my copy). It certainly solidified a lot of the ideas that I've been having previously, but have been too busy writing-for-publication to put in this blog.
I sometimes feel, however, like Robert Putney Drake in Illuminatus! - wondering when the All-Seeing Eye will look in my direction. Maybe I have to lob a grenade into a fast-food outlet or something. (Note to the secret services: no, I have no actual intention of doing this.)
In any case, a little teaser for you: where I'm coming from, magic has to be concrete to work. Truth is always concrete. Ideas and memes are only useful at all when they lead to action which changes the concrete. Gematria doesn't work for me, since letters are not concrete. Sound is concrete. As I am a musician, this is very convenient. As mentioned below, I'm trying to rewrite Crowley's Augeoides ritual accordingly.
From what I've seen of your blog so far, it seems like you have some pretty interesting ideas.
ReplyDeleteYour feedback is appreciated and welcome. A response to something you said below: you must realise that when I say "Marxism" I'm talking about a scientific-political doctrine which is the opposite in every detail to Stalin's bureaucratic police state. Marx said "the emancipation of the workers must be the task of the workers themselves" - something which I think Wilson and Shea expressed in that zen parable about the goose and the bottle.
ReplyDelete"magic has to be concrete to work"
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely.
Are you aware of the work of Marxist anthropologist Chris Knight (author Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origin of Culture) ?
see http://homepages.uel.ac.uk/C.Knight/
for more, including more recent work on origins of language.
Have mentioned Chris' work amongst nostalgia for anarchogothsituationistpunk on my greengalloway blog
http://greengalloway.blogspot.com/
Oh, you're greengalloway? I ran across your blog a couple of weeks ago and it did my head in a bit. Which is of course a good thing. Thanks to the links for Comrade Knight: I'm beginning to build a good theoretical bibliography. If I throw him in a blender with Chomsky, Althusser and Adorno, what do you think would happen?
ReplyDeleteNot sure about Adorno and Althusser, but Chris Knight has taken a strong position against Chomsky... see various entries at
ReplyDeletehttp://homepages.uel.ac.uk/C.Knight/evolutionary_emergence.htm
Alistair
By "Chomsky" I was referring in particular to the "Manufacturing Consent" paradigm - can you spare me some work and tell me whether comrade Knight discusses that issue in particular?
ReplyDeletePhew.... just skimmed through articles on Chris Knight's site.Chris does not critique 'Manufacturing Consent'- rather he critiques (attacks) Chomsky's linguistic model (that there is an inate capacity for langauge - a kind of language machine in our brains) since this model runs counter to the one Chris and colleagues have constructed/ hypothesised.
ReplyDeleteAt political level, Chris critiques/ attacks Chomsky for being an anarchist with long standing links to military funded academic research and for dismissing the social sciences as 'ideologies'.
To crudely put it, Chris suggests that Chomsky's liberal credentials serve to mask the fundamentally conservative/ reactionary nature of his language model.
Alistair
PS my e-mail is alistairliv@aol.com If you would like me to provide a more detailed reply, let me know.