Douglas Mercer
July 23 2024
Perhaps one of the other of us will use not pen or keyboard but sledgehammers, lightning bolts, thunder and nuclear fusion devices to get an idea on paper. Should this finally happen and a black hole is got hold of the spheres themselves will tremble-Kevin Alfred Strom
In the book How The Beatles Knew the author posits that by living at the Asher’s Paul McCartney was exposed to cutting edge psychological and psychiatric literature which enabled him to embark on what she calls an Identity Fracture Project. The father of Paul’s girlfriend Jane Asher, Richard Asher, was the physician responsible for the mental observation ward at the Central Middlesex Hospital; and in 1951 he named the mental disorder Munchausen Syndrome, a disorder named after a fictional character named Baron Munchausen created by Rudolph Erich Raspe; this fictional character was loosely based on a real person named Hieronymnus Karl Friedrich, Frieherr von Munchausen. This factitious disorder (named after a fictional character based on a real person the text which was first published in Ephemeral Magazine, 1781) is one that one imposes on one’s self in order to feign trauma or mental illness.
Heidegger said that poet’s calling is the most innocent thing of all and the most terrible, that his words are not about “lived experiences” or personal psychic excess but due to an exposure to an impersonal being (the cybernetic field) and a capture of the resulting words to bring to his people. Paul’s girlfriend Francine (a former mental patient herself) reports that Paul was distraught over feeling that he had two selves that he could not reconcile, the self that he created by splitting or fracturing himself and his original one. She said he once broke down and cried and hit his hands on the pavement he was so upset over it.
Paul once said he liked his created self but to become that self would blow his mind away (the terrible fate of the poet who feels himself possessed or inhabited). What was happening is that Paul was being seized by the god as poets are. This angst on his part is akin to Holderlin’s who, when he felt the incipient and all too real madness descend begged the gods to give him one more year to create and write and then he would willingly enter oblivion which he then did, but not before encoding the prophecy.
It is when the seer or the poet passes through this dissolution (cracked looking glass), where one learns how to play the game, and is able to reintegrate into a solid or integrated state that he is able to enter finally into the field, this is the clear or open space where the lightning flashes. It is the field in which the glass house that one has been made of (fragile self) is broken in shards or fragments and is reassembled but not as glass but as a shiny hard metallic carbon construct capable of perfect access (ram: random access memory, mar or sea or pool or loop) and one can have free reign and roam through the information field. This field is impersonal and one becomes the helmsman of the cybernetic field, the one who steers.
One assumes as evidenced by the upbeat and lovely yet nearly always insinuating tunes of the 1970s that Paul was able to integrate himself and though there are still remnants of the IFP (she finds it hard to stay awake, she finds it hard to say alive, we haven’t done a thing all day, we are so easily carried away) they are playful and tongue in cheek and it appears to outward observation that he was finally able to solve the problem of the infinity/finitude of the self.
How The Beatles Knew is as important book because it collects many strands of what is now a body of knowledge (psychology, madness, poetry, philosophy, prophecy) and puts them on a firm historical basis. The author misses some things of course but penetrates quite deeply nevertheless. The book is an extraordinary exploratory essay or assay which gives a virtuoso tour of what was occurring in the universities at the time on the subject of the mind and how it was startlingly translated and purveyed to the public (under cover). It is now in the public domain and can be picked up in turn, for as always nothing is as simple as you think.
***
In Mr. Bellamy (the beautiful friend) there is a seer/fool/prophet figure (I told you about the fool on the hill, I tell you man he’s living there still) who fractures and withdraws and undergoes derealization and solipsism (pale blinds closed all day, that’s how I live).
I'm not coming down
No matter what you do
I like it up here without you
He has chosen to live in the icy heights as a Hyperborean (Nietzsche), to withdraw from the world and it consensual hallucination about the nature of reality.
All right, Mr. Bellamy
We'll have you down soon
Now in a comic sequence the world in the form of a keystone cop goon squad conspires to bring him “down” rather than letting him be “high” (nobody seems to like him as they can tell what he wants to do, Cassandra figure).
No one to tell me what to do
No one to hold my hand
Bellamy's got a lot to do
Nobody here to spoil the view
Interfere with my plans
Bellamy's got a job to do
The prophet must work alone without validation. He must not look into the mirror of others until he has completed his mission in the inner world and has made the connections, and built it up and constructed his imperishable castle in the sand or sky (his job or plan). It is only then that he can return from his Ayrie and bring his message to the people (Zarathustra).
In a delusionary state
No wonder he's been feeling strange of late
Nobody here to spoil the view (in a delusionary state)
Interfere with my plans
Bellamy's got a job to do (no wonder he's been feeling strange of late).
The seer will be flooded with ideas which must appear to the world to be illusion; during the transition of straightening things out he himself will feel peculiar; but nothing must spoil what he is seeing for he knows he has a task and a job to do and must finish the project.
***
Lightning hits the house of wax
Poets spill out on the street
To set alight the incomplete
Remainders of the future
William Pierce and Kevin Alfred Strom say that the goal is the creator’s completion. By using the word “incomplete” and “remainders” McCartney resonates with Holderlin’s statement that what remains, the poets found (Remembrance, 1800). That is what is left over is what is still to come (looking into the dark abysm of time to see which grains will grow and which will not, supernatural soliciting, Macbeth 1606). The house of wax is the world (waxworks are ironically used to describe Tweedledee and Tweedledum who appear lifeless and dumb; they tell the tale of the Walrus and The Carpenter where it is time to talk of many things, including sealing wax; a wax museum is a museum or simulacrum of humans who appear uncannily life like but are not real, like wax dummies); thus lightening (the word of the gods) hits the house of wax to unseal the sealing wax. The poet’s relation to the future is the one who heralds it and thus sets it on fire.
Hidden in the yard
Thunder drowns the trumpets blast
Poets scatter through the night
But they can only dream of flight
Away from their confusion
This time the word of the god (thunder) drowns the trumpet’s blast (the seven seals) but now the poets do not have the word interpreted properly and they reject their calling leaving everything in disarray. That is the poets are only dreaming and have not penetrated into what is behind the dream, thus they flee like the absconded gods.
Lightning hits the house of wax
Women scream and run around
To dance upon the battleground
Like wild demented horses
Hidden in the yard, underneath the wall
Buried deep below a thousand layers
Lay the answer to it all
The yard is the field, the grid, the matrix. It is said in the poem that the answer lies beneath the field, that is it is buried (straw bury fields forever). The layers are the levels which one must ascend and descend in the games but beneath them lies the answer. But for now the emblem of the god (the horse) and the furies are in a demented state of insane delirium, because the poet is fleeing from his confusion, that is the poet has not got the faculty together. As such dementia sets is and universal amnesia and oblivion inhabit the earth, until the poet can dive to the bottom and retrieve the Rhine Gold. All of this happens on a battleground or field of war, naturally. On a field of sable always gules; when lightening hits the house of wax it will break down in the fire. Then the fireman rushes in (onrushing time, Holderlin, 1799).
Very strange.
***
Notes:
Using the scaffolding of psychological tropes as a way to write a song Strawberry Fields was an exercise of thinking about the self, or lack of self. The speaker is nothing at all as he enters into the “field” and I call this a cybernetic vision for no idle reason. In cybernetic systems no identity is assigned to individuals, but the primary reality is the resultant action set up by certain participants or parameters. This field set up in the song is a system that carries on forever and is the point rather than the individual that brought it about. Even the creators are “no ones” or “nowhere men” and once the system is set up it will go on replicating forever (How The Beatles Knew, page 237, 2021, Tonal Publications).
According to Heidegger, cybernetics represents the rise of machines and control systems, and it signifies that technology is no longer simply a tool for achieving goals. Heidegger claims that philosophy has come to an end, and cybernetics has taken its place as the fundamental science, unifying human and natural sciences through concepts like information, communication, control, and feedback. Although Heidegger thinks cybernetics is the supreme danger, he also thinks that it harbors within itself poiēsis, the "saving power."
And that is—in fact not in dreams—what has been created. It is reality. What has been created is what we would create if we became the creator. So what does that say about the true creator of reality? What does that say about the creator of such dreams? Maybe just maybe we are the true creator of reality or rather a part of the creator who is willing itself into being right now. And that is what Cosmotheism teaches—Kevin Alfred Strom, One Small Step, page 230, Cosmotheism 2021, Cosmotheist Community Church, Cosmotheist Books, Mountain City, Tennessee.
The Poet's Calling
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Douglas Mercer
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- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10982
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
