Poetry in motion

Poetry is where art, language and the unconscious mind come together and have dirty, dirty sex. (No, that's not an Aphorism). So the question of "true poetry" - defined by Robert Graves as the kind of words that make your hair stand on end, words that have inherent meaning in their sound and rhythm as well as their denotative meaning, where the signifier is itself a signified - is very close to the questions we pose on this blog of depth psychology, practical memetic warfare and "changing one's mind" in the literal sense of the term.

Robert Graves claimed in his seminal (or should that be menstrual?) work The White Goddess that "true poetry" was indistinguishable from the True Religion, which was (in his estimation, based on well-meaning pseudoanthropology which was in fashion of the time) the cult of the Mother Goddess and her twin son/lovers expressed in the seasonal cycle. The initiatory tradition of this sacred poetry, he argued, was alive and well in the Welsh and Irish bardic colleges, among others, but had been lost and driven underground by Christianity. He set himself the goal, in his book, of recreating the basis of that tradition, although he expressly said he didn't consider himself qualified to draw any practical conclusions from it or to start initiating people himself. (Nonetheless, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes apparently had a little domestic cult of the White Goddess going, in which case, Sylvia should have killed Ted instead of the other way around.)

You see, that's the big problem with neo-Paganism. The initiatory tradition of the Western Indo-European Mysteries was broken and a soufflé doesn't rise twice no matter how much wishful thinking you put into it. I spent ten years in that tradition so I know what I'm talking about. Oh, Gerard Gardner got some fragmented folk-magic rituals, jazzed it up with some Crowley and some S&M and started his own ritual lineage, with blackjack, and hookers. But does it have the "true poetry"? Not being a Gardnerian intiate, I can't speak for them, but for me, all the reconstructed paganisms - or like most traditions of Wicca, the ones who claim to be reconstructed - lack it. I can explain this no better than in the words of Leonard Cohen: "A scheme is not a vision / and you never have been tempted / by a demon or a god".

In the absence of a formal intiatory Tradition which still maintains "true poetry" - or what Robert Fripp calls "the juice" - all you have left is what Sufis call an `Uwaysî initiation, i.e. Goddess Herself comes down and taps you on the shoulder and you say me? the chosen one? and I didn't even graduate fuckin' high school. And there's no way you can make that happen, although you can prepare for it just in case. I would say that the paths of modern cults like Discordianism and SubGenius suggests that "the juice" was at least there for a while, and maybe still is, who can tell.

However, in my own personal life, I got tired of waiting for the tap on the shoulder and ventured outside my own cultural background into an intact (although suitably modernised) initiatory tradition. Which brings up the question of how Marxists etc. should react to Burkean arguments that boil down to the idea that "Tradition is like natural selection, it's there for a bloody good reason". Lenin and Trotsky were adamant that there would be no Year Zero, you couldn't start human culture from scratch, that we should take the good bits out of Bourgeois Tradition. So how would Tradition balance with the free creativity of the masses under Full Communism?

I should close with the observation by Hooman Majd: "Not every Sufi is a poet, but all the great Iranian poets were Sufis". And Robert Graves certainly covers Persian poetic lore in his magnum opus. I stopped writing poetry about ten years ago because I got the idea that more people would listen to it if I set it to an electronic beat, but perhaps I need to go back to the purity of the words.

The "Juice"

One of the insights that is the real beginning of wisdom is that rewards do not go to the deserving, in this world at least. The Hollywood megastar is quite possibly a shit actor, and of course the big bands are probably not nearly as good as, say, your own band. Once you realise that the universe does not work that way, you can stop gnashing your teeth about it.

But more pertinently, why do certain creatives get swept along on the path to fame and fortune? Marxist economics is superior to bourgeois economics because the former treats value as a real, tangible thing, intimately related to labour, rather than a totally subjective phenomenon which you can track with superstitious nonsense like "marginal utility functions". One of the basics of Chaos Marxism is that we want a real Marxist cultural/psychological/memetic science, not the obscurantism of po-mo cultural studies or the black alchemy of PR/advertising. So we need to discuss - is artistic value a real thing, like use-value and exchange value are?

Let's toss that "eye of the beholder" stuff out the window immediately. Of course, G. I. Gurdjieff also talked about the concept of "objective art", so that's a clue that we're onto something here. T. S. Eliot - whose stuff I love even though he was an awful reactionary - said that "all great art is impersonal". Let us put it into the language of Chaos Marxism this - "objective art", for us, is art which enables a real psychosocial/memetic current to reveal itself in the Real World of Horrible Jobs. This is totally distinct from "self-expression". Who the hell cares about whatever your emotions are? Unless your emotions are shared by everyone and you've just found a way to put it into words, sounds, images, whatever. Then you're cooking with gas, as they say.

That's not as mystical as it sounds. It's a commonplace that great art and great social movements go together. Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth sum up everything that was grand about the world in which the French Revolution could happen. Similarly, why do you think rock music reached perfection in 1975 (or 1969 if you're an awful hippie?) Because after the mid-70's the social current which it embodied - the radicalised middle-class youth of North America and Europe - ran out of steam, or got bought out. Same with US hip-hop in the early 90's.

It's time we got serious and precise about what we mean by "current". This isn't some kind of metaphor we're working with. It is essential to Chaos Marxism that a "current" in the Crowleyan sense corresponds to real social forces in the real world. And one current (at least) is the version which, if we grab hold on it, leads to the better world to come in which humanity fulfils its destiny and brings itself to an end properly, rather than killing everyone or just bumbling along doing the same crap forever. Humanity is a process that can either finish (when something is lost), conclude (in which nothing will be lost or won), or complete (which will mean a new beginning). Chaos Marxism wants to surf that last mentioned wave.

That triad of terms up there is, like a lot of stuff on this blog, swiped from Robert Fripp and Guitar Craft (aka the Fourth Way applied to the acoustic guitar). Fripp brought about GC because he felt it necessary to combine the Greater Work of evolving the individual personality with a Lesser Work of bringing music into the world. He has made the point repeatedly that, when a huge heavy Current like we've been talking about above hits the world, it will find people to express itself through, and if those people aren't ready for it, tough. They will get burnt the fuck out. Why did all those rock stars die or go massively crazy 1966-71? Fripp says, because their human personalities just couldn't handle it when something big started speaking through them. It is up to the reader to decide whether this is what happened to Aleister Crowley. (Something similar has of course always happened to poets and artists through history - especially the really good ones.)

So - Chaos Marxism's pretensions to a cultural science will be fulfilled when we learn to predict exactly where and when the Current of the Next Era will hit, in not only political but cultural, artistic and even sexual forms. Our Lesser Work is to be able to express it in this world and to help others to express it - our Greater Work is to prepare ourselves so it won't fuck us totally up. This is not idealism. "Currents" do not exist separately from actual physical human consciousness expressed in actions, words and cultural activity. But Marxists who talk about "reformism" (for example) as if it were an actual real thing that needs to have battle done against it should have no problem, in theory, with the concept that the post-capitalist future begins to reveal itself in embryo every time a crack in the system appears, and that we can begin to predict how it will take shape in not only political and economic but cultural form.

The big problem we have to fight against, sadly, is Marxist philistinism - the idea that art and music only matter when making agitprop for whatever the revolutionary cause of the day is. By those standards, Beethoven's Ninth sucked because you couldn't chant it while marching in the Napoleonic Wars.

I'm the goddamned Batman.

Bullfinch's Mythology - or perhaps Crowley's 777 - for the new millennium, ladies and gentlemen and smizmars. Or, to put it another way, a guidebook to the mass media equivalent of the "sephiroth" and "pathways" between them. Or - to put it in plain language - a guide to the memetic structure of the early 21st Western cultural infosphere, or at least that part of it which appeals to internet nerds. Thank goodness it's in Wiki format so it can keep continually expanding, self-reforming and becoming more complex.

The next step after you have a Table of Correspondences, of course, is to use it. The link between this site and the Real World of Horrible Jobs can be seen on those pages which have a "Real Life" section - i.e. where some contributor gets the levels confused and uses a meme to explain a real world event, rather than the other way around. (That's pretty much the Chaos Marxist definition of "ideology".) As we've said before here, once memes are set loose in the infosphere they will keep going until forcibly stopped, which is generally a real bitch to do (Newton's First Law of Memetics?) But it's much easier to subvert them - to impact the rolling ball so it rolls in another direction, with even a small amount of momentum impacting at just the right angle.

This work is only a fraction of what we need, of course. We need a "Ideological Tropes" wiki, where all these memes from fiction are linked into the memetic complexes of advertising, politics, news reporting, etc etc etc. If we can build something like that, it would be like mapping the genome of industrial deathculture. And then our "memetic engineering" will become less like praying for victory before a battle, and more like precisely focussing our own memetic artillery to pwn the enemy where he stands.

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Your reports on using TV Tropes or similar grimoires as a resource to create a work of art or propaganda with real socio-political consequences are awaited eagerly.