Douglas Mercer
March 7 2025
Continued from Dakota (Part Two)
But this chic uptown neighborhood is also home to one of NYC’s longtime landmarks: the Dakota Building. Often dubbed the most famous apartment building in New York City, the Victorian-era German Renaissance co-op apartment is located on the northwest corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. What makes the Dakota building so famous? Beyond its striking architecture, and its sinister elegance, the Central Park-facing structure is Manhattan’s first luxury apartment building, dating back to the 1880s. Built to rival the mansions of the wealthy, the residences at the Dakota have long attracted the rich and famous. Its many celebrity residents included world-class actors, artists, and musicians, including John Lennon, who was shot and fatally wounded in the archway of The Dakota.
There is an archway through which communication comes from an interior court.
The building you see is pale yellow brick handsomely trimmed in chocolate color stone, each of its eight stories is just twice as high as the stories of modern apartment building are. It’s a wonderful sight and the roof almost instantly pulled my eyes up, it was like a miniature town up there, of gables, turrets, pyramids, towers, peaks. From roof edge to highest peak, it must have been forty feet tall, acres of slanted surfaces shingled in slate, trimmed with age greened copper, and peppered with uncountable windows, dormer and flush; square, round, and rectangular; big and small, wide and as narrow as archers’ slits; it rises into flag poles and ornamental stone spires. It flattened out into promenades rimmed with lacy wrought iron fences. And everywhere it sprouted huge fireplace chimneys. Some of the apartments have seventeen rooms and you can lose yourself in there. The walls are fifteen inches thick; the place is a fortress. Take your time and look it over—it’s worth it.
For people who think things are fated, there you are--Paul McCartney
In the novel Time And Again the protagonist says that we now are trained from an early age to see that black lines on a page can be seen to represent a face but that people in the past or savages could not do so. That is what you see is largely what you have been told you see. For to be able to see a few lines and make out the whole story is an art form in itself
In the novel Time And Again a character has the name Julia tattooed on his chest. Lennon’s mother was named Julia and he has a song by that title. Hinckley wrote that the shooting was the greatest love offering in the history of the world. I say that my current offering is not a mystical story or a religiously mystifying story at all. I say it’s a compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated. John and Paul: A Love Story In Songs is scheduled to be published on March 27 in England and on April 8 2025 in the United States.
Pope John 23 took his office at the holy see in 1958; Pope Paul 6 took over in 1963 and ran until 1978; Pope John Paul 1 was Pope for a scant month in 1978 and then John Paul 2 was Pope from 1978 until 2005. So for a period of 47 years every Pope was either named John or Paul or John Paul. The previous Pope Paul was in 1605 and the previous Pope John was in 1316. Other than Jesus Christ (the main character) the two names that are plastered all over the New Testament are John (five books written and appears in the Gospels as a character) and Paul (13 books written). John Lennon met Paul McCartney on July 6 1957 and had a working relationship with him which lasted until late 1969. Lennon continued his solo career until he was cut down by an assassin’s bullets in 1980, and McCartney’s career continues to this day. His album Memory Almost Full was released in the UK in 2007.
You hear them up there? Listen....it's the Beatles! They're here! The pilot of the craft did now know what to make of the whole crazy scene. I was caught up in the extraordinary fantasy. All those kids kept looking up the heavens as though God was descending to the Earth.
Carl Jung thought that the age of Aquarius would begin in 1964 (when the Beatles became world famous); others put that number back by at least four decades; in 1927 Jung had a dream of the city of Liverpool in which he had a vision of a building which down to specifics was later identified as the Cavern Club where the Beatles first played; a cavern (or cave) being the primary archetype in Jung’s system of archetypes; he called Liverpool the Pool Of life. So for some odd reason Carl Jung was dreaming of the Beatles in 1927; the latter returned the favor in 1968 by putting him on the cover of one of their albums. In the ancient world the liver was often understood as the seat of action that was at times even called the heart or mind of the body.
The Four Beatles represent the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse; the locusts of the end time are the Beatles (ushering in universal devastation), the Beatles name comes from multiple sources including The Beat Poets and the Beatitudes (and the locusts looked like horses prepared for battle, with something like crowns of gold on their heads, and faces like the faces of men. They had hair like that of women, and teeth like those of lions. They also had thoraxes like breastplates of iron, and the sound of their wings was like the roar of many horses and chariots rushing into battle). The Winged Beetle was a book of poetry by Alistair Crowley and McCartney’s post Beatles band was Wings. The Beatles actually took their name as an homage to Buddy Holly’s band The Crickets. When Lennon died the cover of Time Magazine ran the headline When The Music Died.
I was alert, intent, and breathing shallowly. Not missing a word. Yet something nagged at the back of my mind. In the way Pickering used his voice in the words and the phrases he chose. There was more than bit of drama—there was melodrama. I think all of us generally act the way we think we are supposed to act. I had two professors at college who would lean back in their chairs, fitting their fingertips together professorially. I had a friend, a compulsive gambler, who would stand around flipping a coin. And now Pickering and Carmody were acting their roles at a time when the melodramatic conventions of the stage were largely accepted as representing reality. Deadly serious, every word, meaning each of them, I think, was appreciating his own performance.
Paul said that the Beatles were not what they seemed to be and Lennon famously said of he and his bandmates that we knew what we were doing.
The game has been going on for some time mostly unbeknownst but is now slowly growing into the light. The dark and difficult (perhaps monstrous) part to take is that we are the players but also the played, and blood from time to time gets spilled on Manhattan streets, for when a White Knight on the chessboard gets up and tells you where to go all bets, as they say, are off. But as the game draws to its inevitable close you have to wonder if we are all dragged along by invisible strings, or at least partly so.
The trails wind through aisle after aisle of filing cases. I realized that I understood that the corruption was so widespread and with so many ramifications that the evidence could be hidden but never completely destroyed. It must exist still, I knew, buried among literally tons of old records, if only I were cute enough to recognize it when I came across it. And to fit the pieces together like a Christmas puzzle. So I became a most industrious clerk!
You are a busy man of affairs, but you have nothing more important, nothing more important to listen to than what I have to say, and at whatever length I have to say it! I have spent endless hours month after month, hunting through those trails through the dust of the years. Discovering and following them as they emerged, losing them, rediscovering them days or weeks later among thousands of false invoices, canceled drafts, receipts, memoranda, letters. The very best of those trails I have preserved. A paper or two at a time, slipped in my pocket, or mailed, to be added to my files during many and many a long evening, I’ve spent there at my desk studying and assembling those files.
Yet most of what I learned proved useless! The evidence full and complete! Irrefutable proof of the most blatant corruption! And to one most of all, an obscure contractor who was paid to provide and install nothing less than Carrara Marble. Tons of magnificent Carrara Marble imported from Italy. At least that is what the invoices and the properly stamped custom receipts say I have found. Here, take it. Keep it as a souvenir. I have many many more.
In the Novel Time And Again Carmody is an obscure advisor to Grover Cleveland. One of the government’s purposes is to get more detailed information about this connection, particularly as it relates to Cuba. In Seymour the narrator says that one day his brother’s poems might be reviewed by the Times (the paper of record), that is if there is enough room after they do the inevitable critique of the new and definitive biography of Grover Cleveland.
Every once in a while the god stages a kind of psychodrama of epic proportions involving history and select human beings as staged actors as a tableau for the purpose of, first, revealing its presence, and second, hinting at how and why it acts in the world. In these brief lapsed times the world goes into a local fugue state from which it then emerges to everyday normality; during the fluctuating span many far flung and seemingly unrelated aspects are thrown together for the purpose.
Ideas of reference and delusions of reference describe the phenomenon of an individual experiencing innocuous events or mere coincidences and believing they have strong personal significance. It is the notion that everything one perceives in the world relates to one's own destiny. In psychiatry, delusions of reference form part of the diagnostic criteria for psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia delusional, and bipolar disorder with mania as well as for the narcissistic and schizotypal types of personality disorder. To a lesser extent, their presence can be a hallmark of paranoid personality disorder. They are also seen in tandem with the concepts of selection or confirmation bias.
It seems amazing to me now I lived in the building one up from the Dakota and I heard him shot, I heard him shot, I head the, I was sitting in the window talking to my manager’s wife on the phone she said things are crazy out here because of the Manson trial (something about Squeaky Fromme), you think it’s crazy there I just heard the cops shoot somebody on the street, just as quick as you could pull the trigger, five explosions. She called me back 20 minutes later and said that was John, and his killer had buttonholed me in the tube the day before, had pinned me to the wall with maniacal sweat but I scraped him off. It was surreal, he was just talking what we called freak spew.
So all the symbols begin to converge or circle about one another.
Pynchon says that the system is too unstructured to be made sense of but this is false; it is a system in flux and is protean and elastic but converges around certain words, events, symbols and motifs and so becomes stable as they begin to converge, and the fictional and the real become indistinguishable. Each part of the hologram contains the whole though each part looks on the whole from a different perspective, and everything must be read in the light of everything else.
Sometimes one has one’s thumb up one’s metaphysical ass—Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge (2014).
During the investigation into the murders the LAPD created a war room. It was discovered later that for six weeks (six weeks during which four people were killed by the murderers) two papers sat around 80 feet apart but were never looked at in tandem. Once the two papers were looked at in juxtaposition the name of the murderer was crystal clear.
Pynchon’s umbrella terms is paranoia; that is the belief that the world is a Psy Op, and there are historical plots; a condition of total knowledge is a condition of total madness, that is a condition total knowledge, of being able to connect everything with everything, imitates the condition of a psychotic break. Which is why courage and skill and a quiet mind serve the player well in the game.
Speaking of the Montauk Project (The Montauk Project is a conspiracy theory that alleges there were a series of United States government projects conducted at Montauk Air Force Base for the purpose of developing psychological warfare techniques and exotic research including time travel a character in Bleeding Edge says (forensic as always): These myths are strange attractors, they pick up little fragments of weirdness from everywhere, all the while they become too crowded so no one can look at the whole thing and believe it all, it’s too unstructured. But still we cherry pick the more intriguing pieces. God forbid we should be taken in, we’re too hip for that, and yet there is no final proof that it is not true. Pros and cons it all degenerates into arguments on the internet, flaming trolling, insinuating threads that only lead one always deeper into the labyrinth.
If one wants to see in the dark it’s best not to look directly at what you want to see; instead, you look a little off to the side and then, from the corner of your eye, what you want to see will become clearer.
The Montauk Project is a conspiracy theory that alleges there were a series of United States government projects conducted at Camp Hero or Montauk Air Force Station, New York, for the the purpose of developing psychological warfare techniques and exotic research including time travel.
In the novel Time And Again after the destruction of the World Building by fire the protagonists happen upon a scene of a charity ball where couples are dancing the waltz, the people there are said to be glittering. A woman who knows her husband caused that fire is said to have a fiercely beautiful face that has a real sense of drama. The male protagonist says if evil must occur it is best it is done with high drama and a sense of style rather than be cheap and tawdry.
I am only wondering if it would not be possible—possible at all events—if way could be found to introduce what I would call the Absolute Spectator. Unknown. Unseen. A man hidden, utterly concealed, concealed far in advance of the audience and actors and remaining hidden long afterwards
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood sweeps the evil demons of Hollywood under the rug, the Tate Family gave the director his blessing and allowed to have the actress who played Tate use some of Sharon’s personal perfume and jewelry. In the movie Tate is portrayed as an uncomplicated, sweet and innocent beauty who is in childlike awe of her good fortune. By shooting the actor who played Manson in long shots or side shots the director is supposed to have marginalized him from the narrative and thus symbolically removed his talismanic power, to have symbolically by means of art cut him out of the drama.
In fact of course Tate used to have her lackeys solicit young White street girls from Hollywood Boulevard and have them brought back to her home on Cielo Drive. There the girls were forced to perform sex acts and were sadistically whipped and filmed and the quasi-snuff films of the girls were passed around to the Hollywood Smart Set for their sick pleasures. As for the rest of them, her husband is a known rapist, Victor Frytowski was a wife beater and a sadist, and he and Jay Sebring (a known sadist) were in the middle of a ten-day mescaline high when the murderers showed up. The movie revises the event as a fairy tale but as no less a person than Sammy Davis Jr. said everyone in Hollywood was into the dark arts, even if it was just for sexual kicks
The 1960s were and continue to be an incredibly important time period, which continues to influence the present day in various ways, both explicit and subtle. This is because the 60s were the first time in world history when that the doors of perception were fully opened, allowing different kinds of forces (bad, neutral and good) to enter our corporeal world. This is why the time-period of the late 1960s and early 1970s is, simultaneously, a time of both bright sunlight (e.g., the Summer of Love) as well as of a frightening and, at times, disturbing darkness (e.g., Charles Manson, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, etc.). One could even say that the rays of the Black Sun started to appear through the clouds of illusion for the first time during those days.
A time period like that, when the doors between this world and the next are blown wide open, is (regardless of what one may think about it personally) always a time period of great transformation, transition and revolution. For, as Grace Slick from Jefferson Airplane says: No matter how big or soft or warm your bed is, you still have to get out of it. And get out we shall.
The Glass Bead Game concerns a mythical Utopia in which a game is played that contains all of human knowledge and codes them in notes of varying frequencies as in a symphony or fugue. The players can play the game and ascend ever higher along the road of knowledge, it is a communal game but everyone enters it through his or her own portal and can control the type of game he plays. How high one goes depends on the native ability of the player.
The game is one of circulation where one can go from point to point, and each point opens on another point in a logical sequence, that is the game is a game of eternal flow and cybernetic circuitry but with logic holding it together. The most important element in the game is connection. The name of the hero is Knecht, or Knight, or connect (Knecht). It uses a circular approach or one of loops (pools: mind, see Jung’s use of archetypes and his writing on associative language) or circuits and one can enter it at any time and any place and at any point.
The game is a game of facets and aspects and windows and there are a myriad of them naturally; and the game has been going on forever, but we are nearing the point where there will be a qualitative change in the nature of the game; that is the game is going live.
In the novel Time And Again the protagonist decides to leave the manuscript of what he is writing in a great decaying stack of ancient religious pamphlets in 1911 so a writer in the future will discover them there. He says that he liked the idea, it gave him a little further purpose to the doing of it but the real purpose had yet to be achieved for the question did not yet answer itself.
The last thing anyone ever said to John Lennon was: do you know who you are?
Any guesses?
That the sending of this should cause the destruction by fire of the entire world is incredible. Yet it cannot be denied or escaped now that you have the souvenir of the event. But it is nothing to be too overly concerned about as it’s only a Northern Song.
Far out the first edge of the rim of the Sun on the water could be seen and the ship was finally visible. As the Sun edged up over the horizon the crowd stared and stood stock-still at the spectacle. And their breaths caught motionless they stared across the harbor as if at ten thousand windows flashing orange in the dawn.
For in the end everything happens in the High German Style.
THE END
