In A Nutshell
Posted: Sun Jul 21, 2024 10:45 pm
Douglas Mercer
July 21 2024
Texts To Be Used:
The Miller’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer (1385)
The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse (1946)
The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951)
Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters, J.D Salinger (1955)
A Whiter Shade Of Pale, Keith Reid (1967)
Building, Douglas Mercer (White Biocentrism, May 19 2024)
The Fat Lady Sings, Douglas Mercer (White Biocentrism, July 17 2024)
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. By positing this game Hesse is cribbing from theosophy and anthrosophy and Rudolf Steiner, as well as the wisdom text of Sophia as found in the ancient Gnostic gospel uncovered in 1896 (Berlin Text) and found once again at Nag Hammadi.
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, that is like travels with like, or opens up onto like, and everything is stuck together (Byrne, 1981). 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 deconstructionists are right in saying that there is no privileged position, except the one you find yourself at. There are no angels or demons are carpenters and no guru, every man here is his own father (Joyce, 1922), every man is his own guru or leader.
The game is a game of facets and aspects 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 technical literature this is known as blowing through the buffeting process and entering into the zone of eternity (see Doing It Empirically, National Vanguard, June 27 2024). Indeed, in the end once everyone is assimilated to the game it will disappear and the rules will be abjured like an insubstantial pageant faded. The missing piece has always been that the game has always been the game of dreamers, or seers and sages, and fools, and the ones concerned with inner intensity. To be pie in the sky or have one’s head in the clouds has always been the hallmark of the player. But in the novel Knecht realizes that such an isolated game is always in danger of decay; and that there must be an interrelation between the game and history (see Kierkegaard’s discussion of whether there is a smooth transition between history and eternity, or if a ditch exists between the two which must be leapt over).
Another way to say that is the game is going to become real, the game will enter the world of history like a fad, or a craze, or a trend, a contagion, a mania or a virus; that is then a real bird will sing (music being the salient way the game is characterized). And though there are indeed no privileged positions, there are key or cardinal clues, the ones that serve as a simulacrum of the rest, in miniature, in nuce, truth in a nutshell (Hamlet-1603). For in order for the game to be played correctly it must be believed and people need to be convinced of its reality, proof is the bottom line for everyone, though poof works just as well, that is there must be a bridge to what is called the real world, there must be a game of show and tell. And the enigmatic point, the one that has been missed, is to realize that you are not just playing the game but are played in it as well, a foreboding recognition that marks a turning; for if one wants to become the king or queen of infinite space the spaces have to be infinite, and for that the game needs breathing room, it needs to go outdoors so to speak. We are not only tripping across the squares of the chessboard, but are being moved around on the squares also, this is the game that moves us as we play (X, 1980). For all though we are all players, the game master has its moves as well.
***
John Lennon was hooked up in a web of fate with J.D. Salinger. In a way this makes sense, they are the twin beautiful cultural ideals of the counter-culture. That the web was so dark is only to be suspected, this is no walk in the park after all and though we are promised a rose garden the summary court is one with thorns (war, strife, Heraclitus, 600 BC). In Salinger’s book Rise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters a message which is the title is written on a looking glass with a sliver of soap. The title comes from the archaic Greek poetess Sappho (630 BC) and the poem is about a man taller than a man who is like the god of war Mars and who is described as arriving like a bride groom, and the poet implores the poets to finish the roof. The injunction is to complete the building which will be no glass house (see more glass) but a solid structure built by masters of masonry in the mind’s eye (Hamlet-1603). The building of this spiritual house has an obvious resonance with the glass bead game, which uses architectural motifs throughout (rooms, doors, portals, dove tail joints, foyers, and waiting rooms, and anterooms, and the occasional flying buttress or two).
At Lennon’s memorial upon his death they played A Whiter Shade Of Pale. The song references The Miller’s Tale which Reid said he had never read. The song also refers to the ceiling (sealing) being blown away. Lennon was said to be obsessed by the song and it led him to go into the world of Carroll and the Looking Glass and English Whimsy (I Am The Walrus, 1967, Cry Baby Cry, 1968, his use of Three Blind Mice). In the song is the line “I took her by the looking glass.” The lyrics also has I wandered through my playing cards (a wicked pack of cards, Eliot-1922).
The Miller’s Tale concerns a carpenter and his wife and two lovelorn suitors for the affections of the wife. In a bit of slapstick comedy one suitor ascends by a ladder to the window to kiss his love and is met by a man’s ass which lets a fart on his face (fart, art, wind, horse’s mouth, horse’s ass). The fart is described to be like a thunderclap (the gods speaks in the language of thunder, Heidegger/What The Thunder Said, Eliot, 1922) The tale also tells of putting tubs and an axe to a roof which will be broken through to be carried away by the Flood. One of the characters is portrayed as a scholar with an Almagest and is interested in astrology. It is warned that madness can ensue should one choose to peer of pry into divine secrets (Holden tells his tale from a sanitarium in Log Angeles. Franny has a nervous breakdown, Holderlin went mad).
At the beginning of his flagship book Salinger has the narrator recount a time when the entire student body was being lectured to by the headmaster when a boy decided to lay a “terrific fart.” The narrator describes it as almost blowing the roof off, that is it was a rafter rattler.
Raising the roof is a common English phrase for a joyous celebration that exceeds bounds, a great commotion of happiness, something so raucous that the room cannot contain it, metaphorically speaking.
***
At the beginning of Through The Looking Glass Alice (the main character) is winding up a ball of yarn but the cat keeps unspooling it. This is a central image in the glass bead game (which is intensely personal, but has universal markers and symbols). We have Penelope weaving and unweaving, we have Ariadne’s red thread as a means to exit the labyrinth, the golden thread in New Age thought of light workers represents intuition, one equates losing the plot with losing the thread, things are finished when the loose threads or loose ends are tied up (religion, Latin ligare, ligament, binding or tying, tying means equating), in Greek mythology each person was granted a golden life thread by the Moirai or fates (three weird sisters, weird ward destiny density), Queen Pasiphae gave her son Zeus a golden thread, and so on. Shakespeare called our life a tangled yarn (ball of yarn, tale) which now has been untangled, the key being not to split hairs but separate them. Needlepoint, sewing, seamstress for the band, the thread is also akin to the breadcrumbs dropped for Hansel and Gretel as clues to the way home to lead them along their way; signposts as it were to assist the traveler.
The actual quote from Salinger’s book is “he damn near blew the roof off.”
Damn near indeed; if you want to know a secret, closer; you can say this is not really happening but you bet your life it is, when April’s sweet showers pierce to the root (rune, rood, roof).
In Raise High The Roofbeams, Carpenters Buddy reads the phrase "ceiling lifted" in Seymour's diary in reference to a plane being able to fly only when the dark clouds disperse.
Take this brother, may it serve thee well.
***
Notes:
In Aristophanes The Clouds Athenians compare thunder to the sound of celestial flatulence. In Greek Thunder is said βροντὴ, Bronte, and fart πορδὴ, pordé, which have some similarity, which is lost in translation. They are two different Greek words that have given etymologically the term "eschatological", which consequently has two meanings in the Spanish dictionary: ἔσχατος, eschatos (last, final,) and σκῶρ, σκατός, skor skatos, (droppings, manure, ordure). The first meaning, says: "adj. Of pertaining to the last end of the grave". The second says: "adj. Of or pertaining to excrement and dirt."
To trip the light fantastic is to dance nimbly or lightly to music. The origin of the phrase is attributed to John Milton. This phrase evolved over time. Its origin is attributed to Milton's 1645 poem L’Allegro, which includes lines addressed to Euphrosyne, one of the Three Graces of Greek mythology: Come, and trip it as ye go On the light fantastick toe. Prior to Milton, the expression tripping on his toe appears in The Tempest (1611): Before you can say come, and goe, And breathe twice; and cry, so, so: Each one tripping on his Toe, Will be here with mop, and mowe. A fandango is a lively dance or a foolish thing. Tripped becomes skipped. All of these permutations happened in London.
To blow the lid off something means to expose the public to a secret, often in a sensationalistic manner.
July 21 2024
Texts To Be Used:
The Miller’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer (1385)
The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse (1946)
The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger (1951)
Raise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters, J.D Salinger (1955)
A Whiter Shade Of Pale, Keith Reid (1967)
Building, Douglas Mercer (White Biocentrism, May 19 2024)
The Fat Lady Sings, Douglas Mercer (White Biocentrism, July 17 2024)
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. By positing this game Hesse is cribbing from theosophy and anthrosophy and Rudolf Steiner, as well as the wisdom text of Sophia as found in the ancient Gnostic gospel uncovered in 1896 (Berlin Text) and found once again at Nag Hammadi.
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, that is like travels with like, or opens up onto like, and everything is stuck together (Byrne, 1981). 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 deconstructionists are right in saying that there is no privileged position, except the one you find yourself at. There are no angels or demons are carpenters and no guru, every man here is his own father (Joyce, 1922), every man is his own guru or leader.
The game is a game of facets and aspects 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 technical literature this is known as blowing through the buffeting process and entering into the zone of eternity (see Doing It Empirically, National Vanguard, June 27 2024). Indeed, in the end once everyone is assimilated to the game it will disappear and the rules will be abjured like an insubstantial pageant faded. The missing piece has always been that the game has always been the game of dreamers, or seers and sages, and fools, and the ones concerned with inner intensity. To be pie in the sky or have one’s head in the clouds has always been the hallmark of the player. But in the novel Knecht realizes that such an isolated game is always in danger of decay; and that there must be an interrelation between the game and history (see Kierkegaard’s discussion of whether there is a smooth transition between history and eternity, or if a ditch exists between the two which must be leapt over).
Another way to say that is the game is going to become real, the game will enter the world of history like a fad, or a craze, or a trend, a contagion, a mania or a virus; that is then a real bird will sing (music being the salient way the game is characterized). And though there are indeed no privileged positions, there are key or cardinal clues, the ones that serve as a simulacrum of the rest, in miniature, in nuce, truth in a nutshell (Hamlet-1603). For in order for the game to be played correctly it must be believed and people need to be convinced of its reality, proof is the bottom line for everyone, though poof works just as well, that is there must be a bridge to what is called the real world, there must be a game of show and tell. And the enigmatic point, the one that has been missed, is to realize that you are not just playing the game but are played in it as well, a foreboding recognition that marks a turning; for if one wants to become the king or queen of infinite space the spaces have to be infinite, and for that the game needs breathing room, it needs to go outdoors so to speak. We are not only tripping across the squares of the chessboard, but are being moved around on the squares also, this is the game that moves us as we play (X, 1980). For all though we are all players, the game master has its moves as well.
***
John Lennon was hooked up in a web of fate with J.D. Salinger. In a way this makes sense, they are the twin beautiful cultural ideals of the counter-culture. That the web was so dark is only to be suspected, this is no walk in the park after all and though we are promised a rose garden the summary court is one with thorns (war, strife, Heraclitus, 600 BC). In Salinger’s book Rise High The Roof Beams, Carpenters a message which is the title is written on a looking glass with a sliver of soap. The title comes from the archaic Greek poetess Sappho (630 BC) and the poem is about a man taller than a man who is like the god of war Mars and who is described as arriving like a bride groom, and the poet implores the poets to finish the roof. The injunction is to complete the building which will be no glass house (see more glass) but a solid structure built by masters of masonry in the mind’s eye (Hamlet-1603). The building of this spiritual house has an obvious resonance with the glass bead game, which uses architectural motifs throughout (rooms, doors, portals, dove tail joints, foyers, and waiting rooms, and anterooms, and the occasional flying buttress or two).
At Lennon’s memorial upon his death they played A Whiter Shade Of Pale. The song references The Miller’s Tale which Reid said he had never read. The song also refers to the ceiling (sealing) being blown away. Lennon was said to be obsessed by the song and it led him to go into the world of Carroll and the Looking Glass and English Whimsy (I Am The Walrus, 1967, Cry Baby Cry, 1968, his use of Three Blind Mice). In the song is the line “I took her by the looking glass.” The lyrics also has I wandered through my playing cards (a wicked pack of cards, Eliot-1922).
The Miller’s Tale concerns a carpenter and his wife and two lovelorn suitors for the affections of the wife. In a bit of slapstick comedy one suitor ascends by a ladder to the window to kiss his love and is met by a man’s ass which lets a fart on his face (fart, art, wind, horse’s mouth, horse’s ass). The fart is described to be like a thunderclap (the gods speaks in the language of thunder, Heidegger/What The Thunder Said, Eliot, 1922) The tale also tells of putting tubs and an axe to a roof which will be broken through to be carried away by the Flood. One of the characters is portrayed as a scholar with an Almagest and is interested in astrology. It is warned that madness can ensue should one choose to peer of pry into divine secrets (Holden tells his tale from a sanitarium in Log Angeles. Franny has a nervous breakdown, Holderlin went mad).
At the beginning of his flagship book Salinger has the narrator recount a time when the entire student body was being lectured to by the headmaster when a boy decided to lay a “terrific fart.” The narrator describes it as almost blowing the roof off, that is it was a rafter rattler.
Raising the roof is a common English phrase for a joyous celebration that exceeds bounds, a great commotion of happiness, something so raucous that the room cannot contain it, metaphorically speaking.
***
At the beginning of Through The Looking Glass Alice (the main character) is winding up a ball of yarn but the cat keeps unspooling it. This is a central image in the glass bead game (which is intensely personal, but has universal markers and symbols). We have Penelope weaving and unweaving, we have Ariadne’s red thread as a means to exit the labyrinth, the golden thread in New Age thought of light workers represents intuition, one equates losing the plot with losing the thread, things are finished when the loose threads or loose ends are tied up (religion, Latin ligare, ligament, binding or tying, tying means equating), in Greek mythology each person was granted a golden life thread by the Moirai or fates (three weird sisters, weird ward destiny density), Queen Pasiphae gave her son Zeus a golden thread, and so on. Shakespeare called our life a tangled yarn (ball of yarn, tale) which now has been untangled, the key being not to split hairs but separate them. Needlepoint, sewing, seamstress for the band, the thread is also akin to the breadcrumbs dropped for Hansel and Gretel as clues to the way home to lead them along their way; signposts as it were to assist the traveler.
The actual quote from Salinger’s book is “he damn near blew the roof off.”
Damn near indeed; if you want to know a secret, closer; you can say this is not really happening but you bet your life it is, when April’s sweet showers pierce to the root (rune, rood, roof).
In Raise High The Roofbeams, Carpenters Buddy reads the phrase "ceiling lifted" in Seymour's diary in reference to a plane being able to fly only when the dark clouds disperse.
Take this brother, may it serve thee well.
***
Notes:
In Aristophanes The Clouds Athenians compare thunder to the sound of celestial flatulence. In Greek Thunder is said βροντὴ, Bronte, and fart πορδὴ, pordé, which have some similarity, which is lost in translation. They are two different Greek words that have given etymologically the term "eschatological", which consequently has two meanings in the Spanish dictionary: ἔσχατος, eschatos (last, final,) and σκῶρ, σκατός, skor skatos, (droppings, manure, ordure). The first meaning, says: "adj. Of pertaining to the last end of the grave". The second says: "adj. Of or pertaining to excrement and dirt."
To trip the light fantastic is to dance nimbly or lightly to music. The origin of the phrase is attributed to John Milton. This phrase evolved over time. Its origin is attributed to Milton's 1645 poem L’Allegro, which includes lines addressed to Euphrosyne, one of the Three Graces of Greek mythology: Come, and trip it as ye go On the light fantastick toe. Prior to Milton, the expression tripping on his toe appears in The Tempest (1611): Before you can say come, and goe, And breathe twice; and cry, so, so: Each one tripping on his Toe, Will be here with mop, and mowe. A fandango is a lively dance or a foolish thing. Tripped becomes skipped. All of these permutations happened in London.
To blow the lid off something means to expose the public to a secret, often in a sensationalistic manner.
