Magick, Linguistics and the Plane of Immanence

The title suggests, "the airplane of immanence," or in Deleuze/Guattarian terms: "lines of flight;"  Magick = lines of flight.

This is the fifth post in the Deleuze/Crowley series with various other of the Usual Suspects (conceptual persona?) showing up from time to time to pitch in.  To honor the Discordian Law of Fives we are going to preface this post with a big I DON'T KNOW! This formulation of model agonsticism was inspired by a quote from D&G's What Is Philosophy (WIP, p.128):

"But on both sides, philosophy and science (like art itself with its third side) include an I do not know that has become positive and creative, the condition of creation itself, and that consists in determining by what one does not know ..."

This resonates with  a subject title Robert Anton Wilson presented in the Crowley 101 course: A Gnostic Approach to Agnosticism.  The 'I do not know' of model agonsticism defines a starting point for experimentation and the search for knowledge, not an ending point of resignation to the unknowable unknown.   Agonstics have received criticism for being indecisive and wishy-washy for not choosing a theism or atheism.  They get accused of hiding behind 'I do not know' as a form of spiritual and intellectual laziness.  That may accurately describe some agonstics, those who don't take the gnostic approach or make 'I do not know' "the condition of creation itself."  Gnosis proceeds through experimentation whether in science, art, philosophy or in some synthetic mixture of the three.  For instance, Magick, which calls itself the Art and Science of causing change to occur in conformaty with Will,  and has a philosophical basis.

Gnosis likes to communicate after its been received though it's not always easily translated.  Robert Anton Wilson was a prolific writer who also regularly toured  North America and Europe giving lectures and workshops.  He had a desire to communicate.  I recall once in an online course: he corrected something I wrote by saying, "magick IS communication" Both Wilson and Timothy Leary described themselves at different times as stand-up philosophers.

Timothy Leary once compared his success rate as a philosopher with a baseball player's batting average pointing out that a player who hits one third of the pitches thrown his way for a batting average of .333 is considered very successful, at the top of the game.  If at least one third of his postulates/hypotheses/theories proved accurate and/or useful, he was a success and that, to him, vindicated the 2/3rds he might get wrong. I don't know if Deleuze would agree with that metric.

This return to the subject of Skepticism should have been included in an earlier post of this series if I wasn't making it up as I go.  This particlular magick/philosophy flow is closer to a musical improvisation, expressing and changing direction on the spot -than a well-rehearsed symphony playing off a musical score.  You constantly make up a lot of songs then one day Like A Rolling Stone (Dylan) comes through, and it changes people's lives.  You experiment frequently with classical modes of music and opera in contemporary electronic form - so-called "Art Rock,"  and get The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway (Genesis).  All of these folks, Leary, Deleuze, Dylan, the members of Genesis, Crowley, and Robert Anton Wilson, who put out acknowledged masterpieces, were extremely prolific.  What they also all have in common is the affinity with, and healthy application of skepticism.  Skepticism doesn't have to slow down extreme and prolific experimentation.  It's ok to get it wrong sometimes. 

The Plane of Immanence

The plane of immanence is not a concept that is or can be thought but rather the image of thought, the image thought gives itself of what it means to think, to make use of thought, to find one's bearings in thought. (WIP p.37)

D&G devote a whole chapter in What Is Philosophy to describing the plane of immanence. It seems, to oversimplify, like a philosophical tool for framing a set of related concepts or ideas.  They answer the question that the book poses by saying that philosophy is the creation of concepts.  These concepts reside on the plane of immanence.  Every school of philosophy creates their own plane of immanence which may include elements borrowed or appropriated from earlier philosophers.  Following the plane of immanence, D&G introduce the notion of conceptual personae - anthropomorphic fabulations used by the philosopher to introduce and demonstrate their concepts. 

The rejection of signified transcendentals such as Plato's archetypal Ideas or the Judeo-Christian God as ultimate causes of things does not diminish the importance of transcendence itself.  Deleuze talks about transcendental empiricism, which appears cognate, if not identical with, gnosis.  From one point of view, perhaps an ethical one, his whole philosophy could be described as transcending fascist, reactive programming to a place of freedom to create and serve what thou wilt within the immanent world.  It requires immanence to make it possible and transcendence to actually get you there.  Without any kind of transcendental empiricism or gnosis, it's easy to reject the idea that extraordinary capabilities are possible or that magick works.

Deleuze and Guattari define the plane of immanence in terms of movement and chaos:

"The image of thought retains only what thought can claim by right.  Thought demands "only" movement that can be carried to infinity.  What thought claims by right, what it selects, is infinite movement or the movement of the infinite.  It is this that constitutes the image of thought." (WIP p. 37)

"The plane of immanence is like a section of chaos and acts like a sieve. In fact, chaos is characterized less by the absence of determination than by the infinite speed by which they take shape and vanish."  (WIP p. 42)

The authors provide a warning that could apply just as easy to magick:

"Thinking provokes general indifference.  It is a dangerous exercise nevertheless.  Indeed it is only when the dangers become obvious that indifference ceases, but they remain hidden and barely perceptible, inherent in the enterprise.  Precisely because the plane of immanence is prephilosophical and does not immediately take effect with concepts, it implies a groping experimentation and its layout resorts to measures that are not very respectable, rational or reasonable.  These measures belong to the order of dreams, of pathological processes, esoteric experiences, drunkenness, and excess. We head for the horizon, on the plane of immanence, and we return with bloodshot eyes, yet they are the eyes of the mind." (WIP p. 41)

The warning continues with words that mirror Crowley's fate:

But then "danger" takes on another meaning: it becomes a case of obvious consequences when pure immanence provokes a strong, instinctive disapproval in public opinion, and the nature of the created concepts strengthens this disapproval.

Later, they warn about and discuss the "negative of thought:" ignorance, superstition, delusion, delirium, illusion, etc. 

The plane of immanence can be seen as an experiment in linguistics. - the notion that words, propositions, concepts, and literature in general, though metaphysical in nature, can change material bodies and states of affairs.  Language, in conjunction with the physical universe, creates reality as we know and experience it.   Deleuze explores this duality between language and physical things extensively in Logic of Sense.  Sense, he says, is what connects language with physical objects.  He could definitely be described as a linguistic philosopher, albeit an unusual one.

Aleister Crowley's Plane of Immanence

The special use of words to alter reality partially describes the method of ritual, or any other kind, of magick. In a lecture titled, Life of Aleister Crowley, Robert Anton Wilson says that one book, Portable Darkness,  a compendium of Crowley pieces put together by Scott Michaelsen, "interprets Alesiter Crowley as a linguistic philosopher with everything else subordinate to that. A linguistic philosopher in the vein of Wittgenstein only further."

Magick in Theory and Practice begins with establishing a plane of immanence in Chapter 0 The Magical Theory of the Universe.  Crowley advises the student, in the first paragraph, to study the history of philosophy.  Yes, magick has philosophy as its base, a unique philosophy that Crowley proceeds to unfurl in this chapter.  In the second paragraph, regarding theories of philosophy:

 "All are reconciled and unified in the theory which we shall now set forth.  The basis of this Harmony is given in Crowley's Berashith - to which reference should be made." (emphasis in the original). 

 Berashith is the first Hebrew word in The Book of Genesis.  Crowley writes of the genesis of his plane of immanence, his new image of thought, thought that can get creatively used to change the world; genesis of a new world.  Berashith represents Crowley's plane of immanence prior to the reception of The Book of the Law (Liber Al) dictated to him by his Holy Guardian Angel. The third paragraph updates his plane of immanence to include the cosmology and understanding he arrived at  through Liber Al:

Infinite space is called the goddess NUIT, while the infinitely small is called HADIT.  These are unmanifest.  One conjunction of these infinites is called RA-HOOR-KHUIT, a Unity which both includes and heads all things. 

He goes on to say in the third paragraph that this theory is based on experience, but then suggests that these ideas can be reached by a particular application of reason.  The last sentence advises the reader to consult a couple of his previous works, the first one being The Soldier and the Hunchback, an essay on Skepticism.  It's almost as if he's telling the reader, don't believe me, find out for yourself.

Another point of interest about these opening statements is that Crowley alludes to Tiphareth twice: "The basis of this Harmony..." (AC's capitalization) in the 2nd paragraph and "... a Unity which includes and heads all things."  Harmony = Tiphareth and head = the Sun = Tiphareth.  I refer to these as solar invocations and note that similar solar invocations or references to Tiphareth occur at the start of Illuminatus!, Schrodinger's Cat, Masks of the Illuminati, and Email to the Universe by Robert Anton Wilson, and in both volumes of  Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari.  The cover of The Book of Lies shows an illustration of the sun and nothing else.  Gurdjieff begins his magnum opus, Bellezebub Tales to his Grandson, with a direct invocation of both Kether, Tiphareth and the omniscient divine spirit with the traditionally Christian, "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen."  He calls it an invocation but makes it more universal saying that " (it) has been formulated in different ways, in different epochs."  When you begin reading Beelzeub you enter a Church.  The difference with Gurdjieff's Church is that he's an extremely funny writer. Apparently he used to do stand-up comedy during the war. Groucho Marx apparently inspired his famous mustache.  On the second page, the fifth paragraph in the book, Gurdjieff makes a direct solar invocation:

First and foremost, I shall place my hand, moreover the right one - although at the moment it is slightly injured due to an accident that recently befell me - is nevertheless really my own, and has never once failed me in all my life, on my heart, of course also my own - but on the constancy or inconstancy of this part of my whole I see no need to expatiate here - and frankly confess that I myself have not the slightest wish to write, but am constrained by circumstances quite independent of me, though whether these circumstances arose accidentally or were created intentionally by extraneous forces I do not yet know.

As if to confirm, the second chapter in Beelzebub is: "Why Beelzebub Was In Our Solar System" which he calls the Prologue.  All of these solar invocations that begin some of the most magically powerful books of the last century indicate a very basic bardo instruction:  before traveling anywhere in the Macrodimensions of the Labyrinth, one must first pass through the Heart of the Labyrinth.  This form of linguistic expression derives from a plane of immanence given by E. J. Gold.

Crowley continues presenting his plane of immanence, his new image of thought, throughout this first chapter mostly talking about qabala while also referring the student to other articles he's written.  He includes a few other key statements to further diagram this plane, for example:

The Microcosm is an exact image of the Macrocosm; the Great Work is the raising of the whole (wo)man in perfect balance to the power of Infinity.

The apologia for this System is that our purest conceptions are symbolized in Mathematics.  "God is the Great Arithmetician."  God is the Grand Geometer."  It is best, therefore to prepare to apprehend Him by formulating our minds according to these measures.

Deleuze and Guattari introduce the notion of conceptual personae in the third chapter of What Is Philosophy? " ...conceptual persona carry out the movements that describe the author's plane of immanence, and they play a part in the very creation of the author's concepts."

Crowley borrowed heavily from Egyptian mythology to populate and express his plane of immanence, appropriating those gods for his own purposes, making them into conceptual personae. Perhaps more than any other modern philosopher, Crowley went to great lengths to present his plane of immanence as a revealed religion. In other words, he ascribes the authority of Thelema, his "new image of thought" to an entity far beyond himself and human life in general.  He maintains that it was divine revelation; his account of the circumstances surrounding the reception of Liber Al has never been conclusively refuted, nor has it been conclusively proved.  Crowley's diaries around that time are suspiciously vague or missing.  His account of how Liber Al went down seems to have been written some years after the event.  He claims to have rejected the significance of it for about five years having allegedly lost the original manuscript.  I'm not saying it was a hoax, I remain agonstic on the subject, however I do know that much praxis with Crowley's techniques - including advances made by his next generation:  Robert Anton Wilson, Kenneth Grant, Lon Milo Duquette , Christopher Hyatt etc.  - and his brother, George, will render contact experiences of equal intensity such that the way Crowley received his mission appears a real possibility.  My opinion is that indeed Liber Al is a communication from an exterior Intelligence far beyond the human though I suspect Crowley of somewhat altering and/or creatively enhancing the narrative to play better for the masses.

 Chapter O introduces another crucial point immediately after Crowley introduces the Thelemic triad of conceptual persona: "This profoundly mystical conception is based upon actual spiritual experience, but the trained reason can reach a reflection of this idea by the method of logical contradiction which ends in reasoning transcending itself."  Crowley demonstrates this by beginning The Magical Theory of the Universe with a hidden logical contradiction.  A German phrase is quoted right below the chapter title "Nur Nicht ist,"  which translates as Only Nothing is and is attributed to a Frenchman - Compte de Chevallerie.  Compte = count - what is there to count if only nothing is?  The editor's footnote says that no such Compte de Chevallierie can be found in their philosophical reference books, but that the phrase is also in an earlier work by Crowley, Clouds Without Water, p.93: "This is our truth, that only Nothing is and Nothing is an universe of Bliss.  Later, in the same book, Crowley calls this "metaphysical nonsense culled from German atheistic philosophy.  You have the introduction of nonsense, paradox and logical contradiction with the opening quote.  A French noble quoting a German reminds me of Deleuze quoting Nietzsche.

The chapter finishes off emphasizing the importance of Qabalah:  "The whole basis of our theory is the Qabalah which corresponds to the truths of mathematics and geometry.  The method of operation in Magick is based on this, in very much the same way that the laws of mechanics are based on mathematics."  Some knowledge and recognition of Qabala seems invaluable to any contemporary system or presentation, across the board, of the science of transformation whether it be Magick, the Fourth Way, Deleuze and Guattari, E. J. Gold, Robert Anton Wilson, Thomas Pynchon, James Joyce, Artrhur Rimbaud etc. etc. etc.  It becomes especially useful in Magick because that is how the knowledge and communication with the Holy Guardian Angel begins and gets established.  The Holy Guardian Angel represents the heart's intelligence, or solar intelligence externalized as a Guide.  There is no greater guide.  Contact with the guide increases with use, prompting one of the great hermetic truths: use it or lose it.  Qabalah serves as the laws of mechanics on Magick's plane of immanence.  Crowley closes with a directive followed by a joke: Every Magician, therefore, should study the Holy Qabalah. Once she has mastered the main principles, she will find her work grow easy. Solivtur ambulando: which does not mean "Call the Ambulance!" (translation modified).  The editor's footnotes gives the Latin translation: "it is solved by walking," i.e. practice.

Time for a related entertainment break.  Join Jimi Hendrix for a short bardo voyage:

 

 Gurdjieff's Plane of Immanence

The first chapter of Gurdjieff's magnum opus, Beelzebub's Tales To His Grandson is titled The Arousal of Thought.  This is the arousal of a new image of thought, a plane of immanence, the beginning of Gurdjieff's unique presentation of esoteric development and transformation.  Unlike his evil twin brother, Aleister Crowley, Gurdjieff doesn't attempt to diagram his whole system in the first chapter, almost just the opposite. He begins from ground zero by stating up front that he's not a writer and wondering what language he should write in.  By realizing his own nothingness as a writer, he's able to make apparent very basic linguistic functions and applications.  For instance, he out and out tells the reader that he's going to use puns:

"I decided to make use of one of the oddities of that freshly baked fashionable language called English and each time the occasion requires it, to swear by my "English soul."

The point is that in this fashionable language the word for "soul" and the word for the bottom of the foot, also "sole," are pronounced and written almost alike."

He goes on to lament the similarity of these two words for the highest and the lowest in a way that echoes the qabalistic statement: Kether is in Malkuth and Malkuth in Kether.  A few pages later, p. 17 - 19,  Gurdjieff tells a story that, to me, clearly suggest a qabalistic basis to his writing:

"I have already decided to make the "salt"  or, as contemporary pure-blooded Jewish businessmen would say, the "tzmmies" (a traditional Jewish sweet stew)  of this story one of the basic principles of that new literary form which I intend to use for attaining the aim I am now pursuing in this new profession of mine." (i.e. as a writer)

The story begins with a certain Transcaucasion Kurd going to a market and being impressed with the display of fruit, in particular, one fruit "very beautiful in both color and form."  He buys a pound of that fruit, which turn out to be red peppers, for 6 coppers.  The story goes on in Gurdjieff''s inimitable roundabout fashion to describe the tribulations of this Kurd when he eats the fruit and finds it makes his innards on fire.  He encounters another fellow from his village who sees his distress and tells him quite bluntly to stop eating the peppers: 

"But our Kurd replied: Not for nothing on Earth will I stop.  Didn't I pay my last six coppers for them? Even if my soul departs from my body, I will go on eating." 

Whereupon our resolute Kurd - it must of course be assumed that he was of such - did not stop, but went on eating the red peppers."

On page 11 Gurdjieff states his intent: " ... to express the so to say niceties of philosophical questions, which I intend to touch upon in my writings rather fully."  As with Magick, his system appears one of applied philosophy.  In the very next paragraph, he mentions becoming deeply absorbed by "philological questions" at a young age.  This seems to me a tip of the hat to Friedrich Nietzsche, whose day job was as a Professor of Philology before he became a full time philosopher, as well as an acknowledgment of linguistics in formulating his new image of thought,  Nietzsche profoundly influenced both Gurdjieff and Crowley.  They also both dissected and used language for purposes.of service to their mission.

Music and The Resistance: The SIMRIT Tour

 The fingers paused at a page of ideographs that evoked shapes of distant galaxies. Austin Spare had delineated the architecture of cosmic dimensions in the picture I had found in the attic, and the wizard Crowley had left marginal indications in  one of his writings concerning sonic notations which acted as keys to other spaces. - Kenneth Grant, Against the Light, p. 84

Grant tricks the reader with the title of the book, Against the Light, playing on assumptions, when he reveals its source from Finnegans Wake:

Yet on holding the verso against a lit
rush this new book of Morses responded
most remarkably to the silent query of
our world's oldest light - James Joyce

Taking a break from the Crowley/Deleuze series for an update on the current situation as seen by this traveling reporter.  Pragmatic philosophy aims to bring about social change.  The practical application of philosophy changes the world we live in.   Intelligent social activism becomes a significant application of philosophy and magick.  Music seems an ideal vehicle for that kind of activism.

I'm Oz Fritz and this is The Resistance.  I stand solidly with Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Hayes and other investigative journalists, brothers and sisters in arms, who form the social memory complex called The Resistance as a response against the destructive anti-humanitarian policies and sociopathic, schizophrenic behavior of the current political administration. The deception and corruption  appears so obvious that I get completely bewildered why it's taking so long for the safeguards of the political system to root it out and shut it down.  Unless, heaven help us, the political system itself has corrupt elements, or doesn't remember that denial is not a river in Egypt. The process proceeds at a ridiculously slow pace.  Impeachment proceedings should begin now for the Russian collusion that helped get Trump elected.  We include in The Resistance the insightful comic observations of Seth Myers, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Trevor Noah who point out and document the absurdities, inconsistencies, and contradictions of the situation. Oliver's strategy is particularly noteworthy - buying ad time in the morning Fox news shows as a way to communicate his incisive comic points to the Television-Viewer-In-Chief.  We leave the politicians to their political games and hope that the corruption has not completely taken over.  In the philosophy/magick game we play music as a method of defiance.

Music wears down and removes barriers, sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently, that prevent empathic connections from being made.  Music works to break down what Wilhelm Reich called character armor - obstacles and blockages of energetic flows to and from the properly, therefore powerfully, functioning emotional centrum. In The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Reich attributes the rise of fascism to sexual repression.  Fascism is very much on the rise again, to a dangerous degree.  We stand by the notion that sexual energy and spiritual energy represent different ways of measuring and/or applying the same energy.  Sexual repression = spiritual repression.  Music lifts the spirits.  In other, very simple words, music tries to enlighten people by making them feel better.

I was fortunate to join a musical assemblage known as SIMRIT for part of their Songs of Resilience, Global Unity Tour.  The band is based around singer/songwriter Simrit Kaur whose music evolved out of a multiplicity of diverse influences starting at an early age with the dark, heavy, mystical chanting of the Greek Orthodox Byzantine church choir she joined.  Strong contemporary influences include reggae and the music of Led Zeppelin, both of which include dark, heavy, and mystical attributes.  Her long time studies and experimentation with Kundalini Yoga exposed Simrit to the culture of yoga mantra chanting which became another influence.  These and other music lineages get blended into an eclectic mix to encompass the broad genre of World Music.  Her singing contains the devotional, sacred, bhakti aspect of cyclic chanting transplanting it into a framework that includes the sounds, beats and melodies of World Music.  A visit to her website reveals outstanding endorsements from her peers both in the music business and the mantra singing culture.  I first met Simrit about three years ago to discuss a possible recording project.  It soon became clear that we both were interested in producing music of a healing and transformative nature; music that reached deep into the listener's soul.  That project didn't happen, the circumstances weren't right, but a musical connection had been made that apparently planted the seed for this future collaboration. In retrospect, looking back, as we sat in a metal box traveling 600 plus mph some 30,000 feet in the air, our divergent paths from three years ago until now resulted in connections being made crucial to making the band SIMRIT what it is today.  The web of synchronicity and Angelic, or Bardo guidance became very strong on this tour as you will soon read.

SIMRIT consists of percussion, bass/background vocal, kora, electrified cello/acoustic guitar and Simrit plays harmonium as well as singing.  I knew Salif, the kora player, the longest, though I hadn't really heard him play that much until this tour.  We spent time together as part of a recording crew in Mali, West Africa for Aja Salvatore's KSK Records.  Salif was also in Mali to study with his kora teacher, Mamadou Diabate, and plug into his long lineage, dating back centuries, of kora playing.

I met Jared May, the bass player, when a mutual friend, Isaac James, brought him to a studio I work at to record improvised music with E.J. Gold.  We must have recorded two or three hours of material straight off without looking back.  I was very impressed with his sound and musicianship.  Frankly, being a New York bred elitist snob, I was surprised that someone of his caliber was around and about these here country parts. I recently had the pleasure of recording Jared again for Sarah Nutting's (MaMuse) recently released solo outing, Wild Belonging.  He played a crucial role in that project.

I met Tripp Dudley, our percussionist, and Shannon Hayden, mademoiselle cellist, when we assembled in Miami for the first rehearsal.  Hayden is an extremely creative solo artist in her own right.  She would open the concerts with a 15 - 20 minute solo set of classically inspired songs combined with loops, samples and her whispery ambient singing.  She had a "looper," a pedal that repeats sound cycles, allowing her to create multiple symphonic layers.  Shannon knew she wanted to be a cellist from the age of three.  It took a few more years for her parents to realize it wasn't just a phase she was going through before they set her up with the instrument.  Her post-secondary education included studying with two of the top cello teachers in the country, who, incidentally, had radically different styles and approaches to the instrument..  This may partly explain her ability for improvisation, rare in classically trained musicians, and her ease with crossing over into the world of electronics, sampling and looping.

Tripp was the most technically-minded amongst the musicians regarding issues of sound reinforcement which helped considerably as I was definitely an old dog learning new tricks.  On our first day, he gave me a wi-fi receiver to plug into Soundcraft Impact digital desk with an ethernet cable.  This enabled him, or anyone on stage, to remotely control their monitor mixes with an e-tablet.  I was fine with that, you can't really mix the stage monitors from the Front of House mixing position except to do what the musicians request.  If the musicians themselves can remotely control their own mixes, then that's one less thing I have to lose hair over.  I was only mildly concerned that Russian hackers would interfere with the monitor mixes to subvert our aesthetic subversion.  Tripp and I had a few other things in common - a knowledge and love for New York City - he lives in Brooklyn; we are both one-eighth Irish and both our surnames end with the suffix: III - "the third," as it's pronounced.  Most importantly, he was stalwart at keeping time, driving the band when they were revving up and keeping a steady thread of metrical consciousness during the slower, ecstatic trance pieces; he set the foundation.  Everyone in SIMRIT is a master of their craft, and as masters they are dedicated, life-long apprentices.  Even more critical than individual skill is the fact that their collective chemistry - a term used in attempt to describe the unknown and unpredictable synergies within the assemblage - is undeniable.  Their whole is substantially greater than the sum of its parts.

We were joined in this enterprise by Matt Hagan (the Pagan) who administered the front of house ticket and merchandise sales as well as helping with the set-up and load-out.  Matt is an accomplished musician also and seemed well-experienced with road life, battle-hardened, as it were. He became an indispensable part of the team helping me out numerous times in small and large ways.  I poetically visualized his role for the concerts as the "strong force" in subatomic physics, responsible for binding together the quarks and gluons to become protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.  He philosophically endeared me when I overheard him pun Matt with Maat, the ancient Egyption Goddess of Truth, and then correctly ascribe its attribution on The Tree of Life.

The Voyage Begins 

With a lyric from a Beatles' song: "there's a fog upon LA..." delaying our flight and causing a missed connection that resulted in getting rerouted through Dallas, Texas.  Salif and I traveled together. The rest of the lyrics from Blue Jay Way, could have aptly applied to our multiple departure delays in Dallas. When your intention is to use music to resist the law of the jungle, there's bound to be push-back.  As I see it, the forces of political chaos stuck out their tongue at us and laughed when we saw the bizarre sight of former Republican candidate Ted Cruz walking around the Dallas airport by himself!  This sounds like I'm making it up, but I have Salif for a corroborating witness.  He was the one who first spotted Cruz, dressed casually in jeans and a sports coat.  I had my back turned when Cruz first strolled by, Ted responded to Salif's look of recognition with a look of his own which seemed to say, "Yep, it's me."  We pulled up a photo of Cruz from the internet ... yep, that was him.  He passed by a few minutes later, still by himself, going the opposite direction and I caught a glimpse of this infamous politician whom I'm told is slightly to the right of Mussolini.  Other travelers began recognizing him and having him pose for "selfies."  This occurred only a couple of days after he'd had dinner with Trump.  Maybe he need to boost his self-esteem with some "spontaneous" public recognition?  

The wait in Dallas began to play out like a bardo sequence especially when they switched our gate at 10 pm to one on the other side of this Texan-sized airport because they changed our plane for one considered mechanically fit to fly - quite decent of them, I thought!  We got to our Miami air bnb house at about 2:30 am.  The house had very little furniture apart from beds, a kitchen table and a washer/dryer.  The house was all completely white, all the walls and the bedding, no paintings or wall hangings to splash a dash of color.  It reminded me of John and Yoko Lennon's famous "white room" they had at the Dakota building minus the white grand piano.  I also became cognizant of the poetic congruence that this was a Southern White House which is what Donald Trump calls his Mar-a-Lago resort located a mere 69 miles north of Miami.  Proximity does have a stronger effect when employing the affective qualities of music to good cause. Our white house and DT's White House are maybe only a casual coincidence, yet one that lends itself to sympathetic magic through resonance.  After the rehearsals and into the night, Tripp and Salif would stay up until early in the morning improvising music with kora and tabla. It reminded me of being back in Africa.

The First Concert

We had two rehearsal days followed by the first concert in a new age center called the Sacred Space located in the Wynwood Arts district of Miami. It was an unusual venue.  On the first day there, we entered a large, completely empty, L-shaped room, with, again, all white walls.  There was no stage or seats.  It had a very expensive oak floor recently installed which meant maintaining a cool temperature in the room (slightly above a meat freezer) to keep out the humidity.  To help keep the floor from getting dinged or nicked, I tried slightly levitating when moving about by telling lots of jokes.  This rectangular, paralleled-walled, parallel ceiling and floor space was very reverberant; somewhere between a church and a gymnasium.  I got a pleasant surprise the day of the concert when entering the space to immediately hear the acoustics being less echoey.  John, their audio/visual technician, had installed sound diffusors along the length of the walls which were hard to detect as they had the same creamy white shade of the walls. He had also taped down our ethernet snake cable that ran from the FOH mix postion to the stage area with white gaffer tape.

I began by learning to program and use the Soundcraft Impact digital mixing desk and getting to know the QSC PA and stage monitor systems before dialing in the sound of the band with a nice, lengthy soundcheck.  At that point, the music was largely unknown to me.  In a recent article in the New York Times Style Magazine, Tom Waits discusses songwriting: "If you want to catch songs, you gotta start thinking like one and making yourself an interesting place for them to land like birds or insects." That guided my approach to invocationally connecting with SIMRIT before I heard their music.

The first concert was a success on every level, and I mean every level; we were off and running.  I inferred its success on the metaphysical/spiritual level by the fact that Coincidence Control significantly entered the picture after that concert.  It first came to my attention the following morning when I read the story of Brian Jones going to Morocco and recording The Master Musicians of Jajouka in The Sun &The Moon, & The Rolling Stones by Rich Cohen.  I had just told Simrit the same story, with a little more detail, the day before.  Though not knowing so at the time, the story was told before the concert, it became apparent afterwards that The Master Musicians of Jajouka and SIMRIT, though differing radically in sound and content, had a similar intensity for reaching into the unknown and bringing something useful back; they both use music to cast a wide butterfly net through the intensity of ecstatic trance-like percepts and affects.  Shortly after I returned home, an announcement was posted on social media of an upcoming release of the Material/Master Musicians of Jajouka show I recorded in Gent, Belgium in 2015.  A live SIMRIT concert album from this tour is currently in the planning stages.  All of the shows on this tour were recorded multitrack into Pro Tools via a MADI usb output from the Soundcraft. 

The day after the first concert was a watershed day in other ways and I blame it all on the music.  SIMRIT played their first concert and the next day I felt hardwired into contact with the friendly nonhuman guide I vaguely call the HGA - Holy Guardian Angel - as some attempt to explain the extremely bizarre series of synchronicities and coincidences that blew my mind and woke me up to the recognition of transiting through the bardo. That kind of direct contact rarely happens to me outside of a special environment like a floatation tank or an invocational chamber ... and just when you least expect it; the music opened a portal.

At breakfast, I read Simrit the short paragraph about Brian Jones recording the Master Musicians.  Some music history commentators reckoned that this was the beginning of "World Music," and it very well could have been in the sense of that genre becoming a marketable brand to expose Westerners to different cultures of music.  I heard that story from Bill Laswell in Jajouka.  SIMRIT is a devotional world music group with strong Indian, African, and European influences along with ties to hip hop and dub reggae.  Storytelling to pass along the Jajouka baraka, all completely unplanned and unexpected.

I continued to read the Rolling Stones book while everyone got ready to get on the road to St. Petersburg and was startled to read a line directly lifted from E..J. God's Clear Light Prayer: "Nothing is happening, nothing ever has happened or ever will happen." This is the prayer from The American Book of the Dead to be read to the voyager immediately upon physical death, and that is the second line.  Cohen changed it by making it three separate sentences.  It was in a chapter that went into Gram Parson's last days and death.  It told the story of how his manager drove a hearse into the airport and hijacked Parson's body so he could burn it at Joshua Tree based on a pact they had made.  Joshua Tree, in the desert outside of Los Angeles, was the location of SIMRIT's first concert after I finished this tour.

As I continued to devour The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones over the next few days it became apparent that this was no ordinary rock star biography.  Without being morbid or sensationalistic, Rich Cohen writes about death far more that you see in a book of this kind, as if he's a covert bardo agent sugar-coating death with popular culture.  Chapter titles include, The Death of Brian Jones  Part 1, The Death of Brian Jones Part 2, Death Fugue, Thanatos in Steel. The first chapter title really gives away it as a bardo guide book: Rock Stars Telling Jokes.

Also included are close encounters with death seldom reported before. For instance, the time Sonny Barger stuck a gun into Keith Richards' gut at Altamont and told him to play or he would kill him.  Barger reports that Keith proceeded to play his heart out.  Another time, during a Stones concert in Paris, Richards received the tragic news that his infant son had just died from crib death.  It was immediately before he had to sing the lead vocal for the song Happy.  Cohen wonders about the emotions going through him as he sings.  It seems to me that through circumstance, intentional or not, that the song became a way to deliver bardo instructions to his son.  The song Happy became his Clear Light Prayer for that moment

Cohen makes himself a character in the book relating childhood memories, his experiences as a reporter covering the Stones, and his journeys to significant locations in their history.  I realized that this book was his bardo journey.  Coming of age as a live sound technician with the former Stones cover band, The Tickets, I could strongly relate ... and resonate, one bardo sequence keys in another, or as Deleuze puts it, a resonance across different series (of events and states of affairs ) to create a disjunctive synthesis.

Through The South

Finally on the road to St. Petersburg. Simrit mentioned that she read my review of Led Zeppelin's Celebration Day that I had sent to her yesterday after she described them as a strong influence.  She also mentioned having read up somewhat on Aleister Crowley hoping to gain more insight into Jimmy Page.  Being uncharacteristically unfiltered in the mouth that morning, I attempted to distill the essence of the initial stage of Crowley's teaching in a few sentences: Thelema = an ancient Greek word that means Will.  It qabalistically adds to 93, the same enumeration as Agape - divine love; therefore Thelema = love under will - love as a material force that can be concentrated, placed and directed, often in some type of healing modality like a traveling group of musicians.  This is The Resistance.  Crowley strongly advised that all initial experiments in magick be directed toward the Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel, an absurd philosophical term he appropriated to avoid speculation and debate about what it actually "is."  As Deleuze and Guatarri emphasize in Anti-Oedipus regarding the contents of the unconscious mind, it's not a question of what it means, but rather, how does it work, how does it function, what can it do?  At its most accessible point of contact, the HGA functions as a spiritual guide.  The HGA operation occurs in Tiphareth - I used the chakra attribution to characterize it that day.  The realization of the HGA = the discovery of one's True Will, the dynamic process that becomes an answering to the question, why are we here?  Carlos Casteneda put it plainly when he had Don Juan say: "follow the path with heart."  Crowley's genius was to realize and present a framework for the intelligence of the heart to act as an (apparently) external guide.  This is The Resistance.

At that point I told Simrit that Thelema  had to do with surviving death.  To skeptics of this notion, I suggest reading the quote from Pythagoras that begins the Introduction to Magick in Theory and Practice (Aleister Crowley). Simrit mentioned that her husband, Jai Dev, had just finished teaching a workshop on death.  Within about a minute of saying that, he called.

The conversation ended, to be continued, and I resumed my perch watching the highway traffic, signs and scenery flow by like a river.  I was sitting in the last row in the Mercedes van sharing it with guitars, tablas and other more delicate band equipment.  That became my spot for the entire tour.  I greatly enjoyed the view of the road from there, it felt like being in the crow's nest of a sailing ship. Approximately ten to twelve minutes after our conversation, a semi-truck with large, white, stenciled letters that read CROWLEY drove by.  All of these incredible synchronicities made me realize that we were in the bardo in this journey through Southeast America.  The Miami edition of SIMRIT had died, shed that particular skin, and were transiting toward rebirth as a new iteration of SIMRIT in the next town.

St. Petersburg was our next stop.  I kept imagining P.D. Ouspensky introducing G.I. Gurdjieff to the local Intelligentsia there just before the Russian Revolution, but it was nothing like that at all.  The venue was a small theater with nice acoustics though a little on the dead side (no pun intended)   I opted to plug our mixing desk into their sound system gambling, but with a high probability, that it was better than our portable QSC front end.  Their speakers did sound good, but were completely unbalanced between left and right.  The liason for the venue knew nothing about the sound system, their technician was on vacation, but he was able to show me where the amp room was and between the two of us, we got the P. A. balanced for all practical purposes.  Also ran into a logic problem with the Soundcraft, I'm still not convinced it wasn't Russian hackers; either that, or a ghost in the machine.  These issues kept me scrambling to finish the soundcheck before the doors opened and I made it by five minutes.  The show went well though I did get get a complaint from an elderly gentlemen who said he was leaving due to the level of bass in the house.  That comment got emotionally cancelled out for me when Simrit introduced the Sound Engineer. Someone turned around and locked eyes with such a deep look that the world disappeared for a second or two.

Heading north on Highway Three Oh One enroute to Asheville, North Carolina.  Led Zeppelin's How The West Was Won live soundtrack blasts through the van's stereo at about 110 dB for about an hour followed by Creedence Clearwater Revival.  The signs along the highway tell ten thousand stories: many of the billboards are hand drawn:

CEREMONIAL FIREWORKS

OPEN EVERYDAY

Reminds me of magick. A while up the river/road we see:

SWEET HOMEGROWN WATERMELONS

We pass a roadside tombstone business with its wares on display, conveniently located a quarter mile from a funeral home where I'm told the clients are just dying to get in.  Location, location, location is the key to sales.  The van's soundtrack has changed to Shannon practicing guitar along with Electric Howling Wolf.  Germination of another strange coincidence:  Tripp and I are talking at one of the pit stops.  I ask him if he needs any catfish bait - a bottle of such substance reposes on a shelf nearby.  He mentions that Catfish was one of his childhood nicknames bestowed on him by a friend.  I told him of Dylan's song Catfish about the famous Oakland A's/New York Yankee's pitcher who was the first baseball player to make a million dollars a year and was from North Carolina.   Two days later, I received a FB friend request from a woman named Cathe' Fish.

The venue in Asheville was a small theater in an historic Masonic Hall that held about 400 people including the balcony.  The ceiling was domed, resulting in some interesting acoustics that made it feel like surround sound in certain spots.  The stage was very deep with a dark multi-layered forest set that looked like it had been there for years.  I kept wondering if something like a creature from a Lovecraft novel might jump out of the shadows.

Another unusual occurrence took place that goes in the category of contact with the HGA.  Our local promoter and producer, Joshua, offered to run some errands.  My small flashlight that I rely heavily upon was on the fritz and I asked for a replacement.  He came back saying that he'd looked for one in the store, but they had nothing.  When he came out, there was a guy there asking if anyone wanted a small pocket flashlight, and gave it to Joshua.  It was exactly what I'd requested, didn't cost a cent, and served well for the rest of the tour; thank-you, Coincidence Control!

The next concert landed in Washington, D.C, the heart of the insurrection.  This venue was a nondenominational church of some kind or maybe a church that had been deterritorialized from its native religion; no pews or altar props yet still the form and acoustics of a church.  It did have some beautiful stained glass windows filtering the light and the overall ambience of a Benedictine monastery.  The music from the show went another step up; the synergy of the musicians becoming greater each time.

 New England

The theater we played in Westbury, Connecticut is one of the oldest in America.  It had been saved, restored and its history kept alive by Paul Newman and his family some years before.  The walls in the hallway between the Green room and the dressing rooms were lined with publicity shots of performers who had worked there over the years - many, many stars.  I was most proud to be setting up on the same stage that Gene Wilder and Groucho Marx had graced.  The ghosts of actors past seemed to positively condition the present with the gravitas of serious theatrical tradition . The transcendental empiricism of this night's music altering moods and banishing all sorts of worries and concerns for a 2 1/2 hour timeless moment of presence.  I mixed this show from above, in the balcony.

The Boston concert was in a church that looked less secular.  The band played extremely well.  Simrit sounded very strong and expansive, reaching all dimensions. It's considered one of the best shows of the tour. During the concert, I walked upstairs to the balcony-like area to check the sound and was surprised to see a pair of women stretching out in yoga asanas, one of them in the Lion's Pose.

Return Home

We decamped from our hotel and drove down to New York City the day after playing Boston, going straight to Norfolk Street in the Lower East Side.  The venue was to be one of the best of the tour, the Angel Orensanz Foundation for the Arts located less than a block south of Houston Street (pronounced "house-ton," unlike the city in Texas).  It had a very heavy (meaning extremely light) vibe in the space.  It had been the oldest synagog in New York prior to reterritorializing as an Arts center for Special Events.  I had mixed this room before for the 1997 release party of Material's Seven Souls cd that included additional remixes.  Off the top of my head, the musicians that played that night included Bill Laswell, Laariji (electric zither),  Bill Buchen (tablas) and Nicky Skopelitis.  Russell Mills constructed a Light Sound Installation while the music played, and, befitting the bardo nature of Seven Souls, there was a good supply of the Moroccan delicacy, majoun on hand.  It had been a memorable evening, and for me in this space, a good omen for tonight's concert.

SIMRIT at Angel Orensanz, NY

photo by Theresa Banks

It often seems that performances in music centers like New York or Los Angeles become showcases for your peers in the business and tonight was no exception.  The stakes always seem a little higher.  I heard that the incredible singer, India Arie was in attendance.  A highly regarded vocal teacher was there.  My friend, percussionist Daniel Moreno took a break from producing Awa Sangho's next album to catch the show.  He had been invited by Salif.  Up and coming musicians will also drop in to check you out.  Riley Pinkerton and Henry Black, both of whom have new recordings being prepared for release, made it out.  The band delivered a moving and powerful concert.

The sound system was perhaps the most powerful on the tour as befitting a New York venue.  Again, I plugged in our desk to the venue's front end.  We also used our own stage monitors.  The house sound tech, Maidson, wanted me to set up the mix position by the side of the stage, he actually had a board for me there, but I easily persuaded him to let me set up in the room so that I could hear what I was mixing.

It felt great to be back in New York again! We had rooms at the same hotel in Chelsea where I had stayed for the Exploring the Hidden Music performance put together by Christopher Janney and Bill Laswell a year and a half before.  My top floor window had a great view of midtown Manhattan including the looming presence of the Empire State building (a bardo marker, for me) a mere eight blocks away, its crown illuminated by white spotlights.  The next morning, the top of that building disappeared from view due to a thick fog rolling in.  I walked about lower Manhattan, enjoying the sights, sounds, and vigorous energy of New York, making my way to St. Mark's Place to rendezvous with Riley for a visit.  She wasn't able to make it, but I was able to indulge in my latest favorite drug, matcha green tea latte, in a specialist tea shop called Physical Graffiti.  It got its name because it was in the center of a row of buildings photographed and graphically designed for the front cover of Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti.  I stepped outside and took a look.  Sure enough, there was the foundation of the Led Zeppelin cover still recognizable after all these years.  Another bardo trigger: Physical Graffiti had been a gift from my stepmother on my fifteenth birthday.  It was wonderful coincidence that the matcha latte there remains the best one I've had to date.

The next big city performance would be in Toronto, but first a show in Ithaca, NY (not the long sought home of Odysseus in Ancient Greece) on the way north.  We dropped the equipment off at the theater then went out to find some lunch in the downtown outdoor mall area.  Maybe it was the contrast from the City that made the streets of Ithaca seem almost deserted.  The older, faded, colonial-style buildings and the ghostown-like ambience provided a very strong, bardoesque quality to the proceedings.  It felt like being on the set of a Twilight Zone episode, or Lost In Space when they encounter a simulated earth environment.  Another strange coincidence tipped me off: on the ride into downtown I read an anecdote about Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper and the film Easy Rider from the book, Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll's Legendary Neighborhood, and as soon as I stepped out of the van, I spied a film theater down the road with Easy Rider on the marquee.  This timing made it seem that the book was projecting itself out of its pages in 3D.  Or maybe I had projected myself into the book and was partially living in that reality, that parallel Universe, as Robert Anton Wilson might speculate.  Even the lunch spot felt like a bardo chamber.  Part of it was under construction.  Construction areas almost always feel like bardo zones to me, buildings in transition, but that might be partially explained by my past history as an apprentice millwright.  After lunch we watched a street magician doing tricks and illusions on the mall.  Apart from the magician, we were the only people on the street

The theater felt like television studios I've been in without the big cameras.  The show felt quite intimate.  The rows of seats were tiered like a Roman or Greek amphitheater, so that even at the back, you felt like you were close, hovering over the band.  I tied into their speakers and the sound was quite good.  The intimacy of the space meant that the mix position was close to the mains for a change.  The sound system did give some push back to the invocation in the last half hour of the show with the loud distorted cry of an ailing speaker or amplifier.  It happened only about a half dozen times on certain transients, but it was loud in one area of the theater; an uninvited, random audio guest had joined us.  Both the theater's tech and I backed off on the volume which may have mitigated the problem. It didn't appear to interfere with the enjoyment of the concert.  I was a little frustrated and silently questioned why certain theaters couldn't get their sound together.  Then I remembered where I was and put it in perspective: there had been a lot less obstacles and we got to the home-space in Ithaca much quicker and easier than Odysseus had in the Illiad. 

Canada 

Toronto is another city I love, though this was only my third time visiting.  Growing up in Calgary, Toronto became a kind of Promised Land where young bands could travel, put on a showcase in a local club, like the El Mocambo where the Stones played, and hopefully get signed by a major record label.  My first visit to T.O. was with such a band.  This time it was a sold-out concert in a small church just north of the Kensington Market area.  During one transition between songs, Simrit explained the origins of her elaborate head dress from the Minoan civilization of Ancient Crete.  She said that their remarkably advanced culture was guided by women who wore these head dresses when they met in council.  This is part of Simrit's biological lineage.  She connects and resonates with this ancient matriarchal wisdom communicating it through her being in the music. 

Whenever possible, I like to step out of the venue after soundcheck and go for a short exploratory walk to get a lay of the land; find out where we our situated in space/time, scope out the local environment.  R.U. Sirius recounts in Timothy Leary's Trip Through Time that Leary stressed the importance of being aware of your geographical coordinates at all times.  Where are you on the body of the Earth at this moment?  This seems especially important when constantly traveling, and also seems like good bardo voyaging advice.  I soon found myself in the Kensington Market district with its wide range of ethnic diversity reflected in the restaurants, food bars and shops.  I noticed a large white building prominently advertising itself as a medical marijuania dispensary which I thought a little bold, but then reflected that the mother of the current Prime Minister used to party with the Rolling Stones in Toronto.  I found a good hot matcha drink on the way back to the church to clear the mind  and invoke presence in preparation for the night's music.  

Our nomadic troop checked into a hotel late at night following the concert and loadout. We had the next day off.  I went out mid-morning for a long walk up Yonge Street, a walk I'd taken on my initial visit to this town.  The temperature was brisk, but not too cold if one kept to a vigorous pace.  A lot had changed in the 35 years since walking this way before.  It had an air of faded glory, like it had seen it's time, but the real action was now somewhere else.  I ended up walking over to the famed Maple Leaf Gardens which is like the Vatican, the holy shrine, to young Canadian kids growing up in the culture of ice hockey in the '60's, '70's and 80's.  Maple Leaf Gardens is to Toronto what Madison Square Garden is to New York, iconic spaces for special events - not only sports, they've both held their fair share of rock concerts.  Why "Gardens?" Maybe it suggests a space or a perception of primal paradise, perhaps the natural state after the ego programming gets temporarily dismantled and removed due to a powerful music event.  Back at the hotel, I noticed some construction zones where they were renovating some of the floors..

In Gurdjieff's scheme of things, to keep the intention of on ongoing process from going off course, one requires, at certain critical moments, an influx of energy or stimulus from something outside that process, or what he called a "shock."  These shocks, when they work, allow the process to pass through the critical final interval and reach the next octave.  I was fortunate to get this influx of energy in a big way when meeting up with my friends Terry, Lisa and Jody Tompkins, first at the SIMRIT concert, then again the next night over a delicious Japanese dinner.  Terry and Lisa are songwriters and musicians who have been in and around the Canadian music industry for many years.  Jody is a rising sound engineer star.  Their review of the concert was very positive.  They gave me some excellent feedback, particularly Lisa, who explained the importance of the reverb effects on Simrit's voice, something Simrit and I had spent time fine tuning.  Terry described a sense of blissfulness that the music guided him toward.  It was great to get this kind of educated viewpoint from people who know, and really appreciate diverse types of music and who are players themselves.

A large, Universalist Church was the site of our next concert in Ottawa.  A massive, working pipe organ took up the whole back wall behind the stage/altar area.  Most of the pipes were vertical except for a small row in the middle set on a horizontal plane.  I imagined them as small trumpets for the cherubim when they got really cooking.  The acoustics were amazing, quite possibly the best on the tour.  I took some moments to quietly sit in the space about an hour before the doors opened after almost everyone left for dinner.  Salif was playing his kora in an antechamber to the church we had reterritorialized as a concert space.  The door was open between the two rooms.  The kora has a soft, delicate sound when not amplified like a mezzo-piano African harp.  Yet the reverberations in the large room from the kora's indirect sound filled it with a distant, guiding refrain.  A sound promising a distant road home.

These glorious acoustics inspired me to relay a memory to Simrit of seeing a Canadian hippie folksinger named Valdy play the Jubilee Auditorium many years ago.  Valdy had departed from the form of his first song to vocally improvise like scat singing, almost yodeling at times.  He apologized to the audience afterwards saying it was a rare treat to have golden acoustics like these to bounce his voice off of.  It seemed like Simrit really stretched out that night taking full advantage of the room's natural sound.  To my perception, SIMRIT, the collective assemblage, went to a whole new level, breaking out of a certain stasis to try different things, taking more musical risks. A moderate snow storm didn't keep the hardy souls of Ottawa away.  It did make loading out a little trickier especially when it became apparent that this was the perfect weather for a snowball fight.

A club called Lion d'Ors in Montreal was our next and last stop on the tour.  It was unique for being the only venue that wasn't a church, theater or an amorphous performance space.  It was a cabaret.   I experienced one more incident of Coincidence Control providing extraordinary help.  The power supply for Simrit's  "in ear" monitor system had gone missing. It would be much more difficult for Simrit to hear herself without it, the whole band would have to adjust.  It seemed that musically the shows had climbed another notch each time.  I was concerned that this issue would throw that evolution off course.  We tried another power supply, but it was the wrong voltage and didn't work.  It was a Sunday and the music stores weren't open yet.  I mentioned this to the house sound tech.  He took a look through the flotsam and jetsam of spare cables, turn-arounds, and adaptors, and found a power supply that worked.  Another band had left it behind, he had no use for it so he gave it to us. A crisis and major inconvenience averted.

This was our only afternoon show though the nightclub ambience and shuttered windows made it seem like it could have been any time after the show began.  I took a quick walk around the neighborhood and discovered the Sacre Coeur church just down the street.  Across from that, a little further down, was the modest Sacre Coeur medical clinic.  This was another bardo marker for me.  I had begun my experiments recording the ambience of sacred spaces at the Basilica du Sacre Coeur in Paris in 1990 as a way of investigating the use of sound for bardo navigation.  At the time, I didn't know enough French to translate "sacre coeur" and had only chosen it because its prominence in the Parisian skyline showed it to be an interesting piece of architecture.

It was yet another stellar concert by SIMRIT.  I perceived it as a continuation of the level of quality they reached in Ottawa.  After the show, an attractive woman, one of the volunteers, approached and asked if she could help me in any way.  I said, " no, I was good," whereupon she excxlaimed, "this was the best sound I ever heard.  She qualified this extravagant statement by saying that she had worked in the music biz for twenty years with artists like Led Zeppelin (the L.Z. refrain again) and Jethro Tull, and had a close friendship with Robert Plant.  I was grateful to hear this comment and attributed it to the ecstatic place the music had brought her to - you know, that place where everything is the best you've ever experienced.

I don't know the effect SIMRIT's music had on the current American political regime, it's not measurable.  I did have direct personal experience on several occasions of people being profoundly moved such as Robert Plant's friend.  For a brief period of time, during these eleven concerts, a portal had been opened into another dimension, i.e. another way to measure space and time, taking them out of the world-illusion of egos, countries, and the grinding capitalist machine  (the Trump regime) to connect with something real.  This is The Resistance.  Peace.

Finnegans Wake and Music

Waywords and Meaningsigns is an ongoing project run by Derek Pyle that invites musicians and sound artists to construct a piece of music or create an audio environment of some kind set to a passage from Finnegans Wake.  The deadline for the 20017 edition is looming, it's May 4th -  I am late in getting this posted - but there's still time for a submission.  As those familiar with this epic work know, Finnegans Wake, apart from including actual songs with musical notation, has many passages that sound like music when read aloud.  At times, it seems that James Joyce places more value in the rhythm, sounds and implied melodies the words make, relegating their meaning to a secondary role.  James Joyce was an accomplished singer who had the literary ability to sing through his text.

This amazing project follows the hallowed footsteps of no less a musical icon than John Cage who composed Roarotorio, an Irish circus on Finngeans Wake.  I intend to participate though my submission will be for next year's edition.

I plugged in the word "music" to a Finnegans Wake concordance and this was the first entry, from page 48:

a choir of the O'Daley O'Doyles doublesixing
the chorus in Fenn Mac Call and the Seven Feeries of Loch Neach
Galloper Troller and Hurleyquinn the zitherer of the past with his
merrymen all, zimzim, zimzim.  Of the persins sin this Eyrawyg-
gla saga (which thorough readable to int from and, is from tubb 
to bottom all falsetissues, antilibellous and nonactionable and this
apllies to its whole wholume) of poor Osti-Fosti, described as 
quite a musical genius in a small way and the owner of an
exceedingly niced ear, with tenorist voice to match, not alone,
but a very major poet of the poorly meritary order (he began
Tuonisonian but worked his passage up as far as the we-all-
hang-together Animandovites) no end is known.

Text like this almost begs for musical accompaniment to frame and enhance the music already there.

Here is the official press release about the project:

A diverse cast of musicians, readers, and artists are creating what may be the year's most innovative musical-literary project: James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake set to music. 

An ongoing project with over 100 contributors from 15 different countries, Waywords and Meansigns features original music and readings from punk rock icon Mike Watt, Mercury Rev veterans Jason Sebastian Russo and Paul Dillon, Joe Cassidy of Butterfly Child, psych-rockers Kinski, vocalist Phil Minton, poet S.A. Griffin, Martyn Bates of Eyeless in Gaza, Little Sparta with Sally Timms (Mekons) and Martin Billheimer, composer Seán Mac Erlaine, Schneider TM, and many more.

“James Joyce basically invented his own language when writing Finnegans Wake,” explains project director Derek Pyle. “It's the kind of thing that demands creative approaches — from jazz and punk musicians to sound artists and modern composers, each person hears and performs the text in a way that’s totally unique and endlessly exciting.”

With the 2017 release debuting on May 4, Waywords and Meansigns utilizes their independent digital platform to make Joyce’s text more accessible to 21st century audiences. Waywords and Meansigns also aims to release future musical recordings of Finnegans Wake on an ongoing basis — interested individuals are encouraged to contact project director Derek Pyle. All audio from the project is distributed freely under Creative Commons licensing at www.waywordsandmeansigns.com. 

Waywords and Meansigns - finnegans wake set to music ... www.waywordsandmeansigns.com Waywords and Meansigns: Recreating Finnegans Wake in its whole wholume. James Joyce's Finnegans Wake set to music unabridged. Musical adaptation audiobook.

Deleuze and Qabalah

One cannot help wondering, given passages like this in his later writings, whether or not there is throughout Deleuze's work a kind of secret priority or silent perogative given to esoteric knowledge and practice as a clue to the multiple meanings of immanence, such that to completely comprehend the significance of Deleuze's philosophy one would have to delve more deeply into previous esoteric traditions. 
 - Joshua Ramey, The Hermetic Deleuze, Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal p.102 -103

Indeed!  The Hermetic Deleuze is an excellent book about this subject matter, I highly recommend reading it.  It provides much background material to support the theory that Gilles Deleuze provides a metaphysics for Thelema.  By that I mean that he fleshes out the mechanics of how Thelema works to make practical sense.  Much of the philosophy or metaphysics may seem abstract, but it always links with actual events and states of affairs.  Deleuze reveals how to make Thelema work.

 If you are just joining the conversation, Thelema is a Greek word chosen by Aleister Crowley to represent his line of work.  It literally translates as Will, and with the Greek spelling, qabalistically transposes to 93.  The word agape, which means divine love, also transposes to 93.  This makes the two words qabalistically equivalent.  Thelema = love under will (not to say that it doesn't carry multiple alternate interpretations as equally valid).  The various descriptions Deleuze gives to "sense" seem closely related to Thelema.  The way I see it, The Logic of Sense = the logic of Thelema.  I alluded to one such connection between Thelema and sense in the first post of this series when stating that Deleuze (in LS) considered Lewis Carroll's fairyland story, Sylvie and Bruno, a masterpiece.  Of course, you have to read both parts of that story to get the connection (something else I highly recommend) so I will continue showing how Thelema and sense are related in different ways as we proceed through this ontological and theurgic labyrinth.

The Hermetic Deleuze (HD) doesn't mention Crowley or Thelema,  There are a couple of quick citations of kabbalah that are quite good. Written from a perspective of academic philosophy, Ramey is extremely articulate with both the philosophical and esoteric themes and how they mesh.  I don't necessarily agree with all the conclusions or premises, but he provides a great deal of valuable information on the direction of the early Deleuze, particularly in the third chapter, Deleuze and the Esoteric Sign, worth the price of admission alone. We find out that one of Deleuze's earliest publications titled Mathesis, Science and Philosophy is a Preface for a book by Johann Malfatti called Mathesis.   Malfatti was a doctor and healer for Beethoven as well as being a speculative esoteric writer.  Mathesis, as I understand it, is short for mathesis universalis - a universal math that can do or solve anything, perhaps a TOE - theory of everything.  " Malfatti's work envisions a medicine that would be effective not through technical proficiency, but as a lived embodiment of knowledge' a practical path to healing through the elaboration of sympathies, symbioses and vibrational patterns." (HD p.90).  Anyone with knowledge of Crowley's approach to arcane wisdom will see how closely Deleuze's Mathesis, Science and Philosophy resonates from its title alone.  Crowley would have it as Magick, Science and Philosophy.  Crowley vitalizes the notion of mathesis by associating his version with the Egyptian god Horus and gives instructions on how to make contact with this omniscient force.  Jimmy Page and Robert Plant also vitalize mathesis and provide an alternate contact point/entrance with the song The Song Remains the Same.  Qabalah seems yet another entry point into mathesis.

Though there isn't any discussion of qabala in HD  the sense of it clearly surfaces at times through quotes Ramey chose to use.  They sound exactly like how qabala functions without explicitly making the connection " ... the development of symbolic systems is as much a matter of creative encounter as it is a deciphering of signs. ... in poeticizing the world by a multilayered reading of it, always both new and traditional, we risk forgetting that poiein (etymology of poet -ed.) means first of all to create.' HD (p. 204).  These quotes are from the esoteric scholar Antoine Faivre.

According to Ramey, Deleuze betrays a close affinity and familiarity with occult theory in Mathesis, Science and Philosophy (MSP). Deleuze begins the essay by asking what the word "initiated" signifies. I just had an interesting coincidence searching for MSP online.  Found it here at anarchistnews.org, scrolled down to see how long it goes, and then read the first comment by someone named Squee: "So is this any different than Crowley's work "The Book of Thoth" - or many other numerological texts on the meaning of base 10 numbers?" Ramey points out that Deleuze asked that this article, along with five other early pieces, be removed from his official corpus.  Is this because he had a change of heart and repudiated his early interest in the magical arts, or was he choosing to go more underground, more occult with this interest.  I suggest the latter.  Talking about the occult seems paradoxical or oxymoronic in itself; as soon as you talk about the occult it becomes no longer hidden ... unless, of course, what you're saying intends to hide it further.  Ramey mentions in more than one place the strong prejudice Academic Philosophy has against anything to do with the paranormal or what inaccurately gets called, "the supernatural;" inaccurately by those overly challenged with the thought of immanence.  Deleuze was an actor par excellence in the drama of philosophy.  MSP seems out of character for that role.

The conclusion Ramey reaches here resonates with the practical side of Thelema: "But if traced carefully, a line clearly runs from Deleuze's early interest in the dream of mathesis unversalis to his attention to the cosmic dimension of art, to increasing attention, with Guattari, to the contours of specific forms of experimental practice. (HD p. 207).  Unsurprisingly, there is much material in this book that could apply to Thelema.  To this biased observer, Thelema marks the pinnacle of current hermetic thought and practice.

Rhizome and the Tree of Life

We will begin our investigation of Deleuze and Guattari's use of qabalah with the concept of the rhizome which they introduced approximately in the middle of their respective careers.  The Rhizome serves as the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus (ATP).  I am going to get a little ahead of myself and perhaps stretch your credulity a tad to describe how the book opens with some qabalistic indicators.  Then I'll resume building the argument from the ground up.  It starts on page 3 with this diagram of a music composition:

1. Introduction: Rhizome

It's reproduced more clearly in the book; there are dates one can see with a magnifying glass open to qabalistic interpretation, check it out.  Later in this essay, we'll see how various authors let the readers on to their use of qabalistic correspondences by presenting a very obvious link as a way to key in the input and initiate a search for subtler revelations.  The obvious (to a qabalist) connection in this diagram is the title of the music score: XIV piano piece for David Tudor 4.  

XIV = the path of Daleth = Door (as in David Tu-dor); The Hebrew letter called daleth = the English letter d and has the value of 4 by Gematria. The use of phonetic puns, like Tudor = two door, shows frequent usage in qabala communiques largely due to the pioneering linguistic efforts of James Joyce who gets invoked as early as page 6 in ATP.  Rhizome seems another phonetic pun; home is where, again?  The first sentence of the Introduction reads: "The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together."  To an imaginative interpreter like myself, the two of Tu-dor connects with the second word, two, thus implying that the two of them make a door.  Experience with ATP reveals that it indeed becomes a door into alternate models of abstraction and experience.  Further knowledge of the correspondences with daleth, as for instance The Empress tarot card, really shows where they are coming from, as well as making a direct connection with The Logic of Sense as it relates with the definition of Thelema delineated above. Tu-dor also suggests the dormouse from Alice in Wonderland which then links to the Jefferson Airplane lyric, "Remember what the dormouse said: feed your head, feed your head."  The trite hippie interpretation says that it means to take drugs; the qabalistic interpretation (Head = Resh = The Sun) indicates an instruction to feed your solar nature, an instruction explicitly alluded to in the first paragraph.

Again, if you're just joining the conversation, all these correspondences derive from the qabalistic dictionary put together by Crowley with some help from Allan Bennett, after inheriting it from MacGregor Mathers, one of the founders of the Golden Dawn.  It's published as 777 and other Qabalistic Writings of Aleister Crowley.  There is much supplemental material in The Book of Lies.  This is the dictionary of reference for the qabala used by writers such as James, Joyce, Ezra Pound, Robert Anton Wilson, Thomas Pynchon, to list the ones where I've seen it frequently deployed, and, as I've very recently discovered, Deleuze and Guattri. Robert Heinlein uses it a little bit in Stranger in a Strange Land as does Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

The first plateau in A Thousand Plateaus, the Introduction lifts the qabalistically aware reader up to a solar plateau immediately, or at least one where the sun is shining.  Deleuze and Guattari have an interesting way of transmitting esoteric data by baldly and blatantly stating it in a context where it seems offhand, not to be taken seriously; the fine art of misdirection.  For those who read the blog on paradox and nonsense, remember what it said about how qabalists love to play with opposite meanings.  Speaking of why they use their own names as authors, the eighth and ninth sentences in the book say: "To render imperceptible not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel and think.  Also because its nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows its only a manner of speaking."  I see this as important not only for the solar invocation which aligns with and reinforces the correspondences at the top of the intro, but because it also gently states an outdated conception that colors, or programs, our common experience of the world.  ATP appears to suggest war machines against that particular kind of sleep; assumptions about how things are we unquestioningly take for granted.  The solar invocation also resonates with the smiling sun face found on the cover of every copy of:

Buckminster Fuller used to point out that for a few hundred years at least we've known the world  is not flat, yet most people do not have the experience or awareness of living on a sphere.  We usually experience this planet as variations of flatness extended in the four cardinal directions.  The language of "sunrise" and "sunset" reinforce this unconscious and conventional way of perceiving the world.  The sun does not move around the earth, it does not rise, the earth spins on its axis to meet it or leave it depending upon where you are on the globe at any particular time.  Deleuze and Guattari say, 'it's nice to talk like everybody else,' - probably one of the most hilarious understatements in the book, as this book is written like no other and nowhere else does it remotely sound like how anyone else would talk.  Perhaps we can infer that ATP can change our experience of life as radically as learning the earth isn't flat?

I will also point out obvious references to the work of  another occultist, G.I. Gurdjieff, and his particular series (body of work), or school.  The "act, feel, and think" in the above quote reflects the three brains of man in Fourth Way (i.e. Gurdjieffian) terminology - the physical, emotional and intellectual.  Starting the book by saying it's nice to talk like everybody else is the exact opposite of how Gurdjieff begins Beelzebub Tales To His Grandson (his magnum opus) when he tells the story  of how his Grandmother told him on her deathbed never to do as others do.  I see this as a deliberate resonance.  The introduction to Beelzebub is titled, The Arousing of Thought, also strongly resonant with Deleuze's project both with and without Guattari, to create a new image of thought.  Gurdjieff clearly states the intention of Beelzebub, an intention that sounds like a prime motive for A Thousand Plateaus: "To destroy mercilessly and without any compromise whatever, in the mentation and feelings of the reader, the beliefs and views, by centuries rooted in him, about everything existing in the world.  To make you see and understand on one level, the literal level of astronomical bodies in Space, that the sun does not rise, the earth spins to greet it.

Now we go rhizomatically back to the rhizome.  The rhizome concept is one D&G borrowed from botany to describe a nonunified, nonhierarchical, nonlinear proliferation of connections and flows. "In botany and dendrology, a rhizome (/ˈraɪzoʊm/, from Ancient Greek: rhízōma "mass of roots",^[1] from rhizóō "cause to strike root" (wikipedia).  The etymology, 'cause to strike root' connects with qabalistic considerations already mentioned, as well as the notion of ATP mapping out one strata as a manual of practical Alchemy for the formation of higher, subtler, nonorganic bodies; stated plainly on page 4: All we talk about are multiplicities, lines, strata, and segmentarities, lines of flight and intensities, machinic assemblages and their various types, bodies without organs and their construction and selection, the plane of consistency, and in each case the units of measure; bodies without organs = nonorganic bodies.

The polar opposite to the rhizome model is the tree, the arborescent model.  The tree has a determined unity of form, it becomes a particular set thing.  It could be said that the aborescent model of growth attempts to copy a transcendental unity of some kind, it is set in its ways and follows a linear predictable growth.  They say that arborescence has a hierarchical structure.  This brings us to the Tree of Life, the basic model used in Qabalah.   It represents as a tree and has distinct arborescent features which would seem to make it not a rhizome, but we shall see that it is not that cut and dry.  D&G begin mention of arborescence with words about the nature of "the book" that  also resembles qabalistic genealogy  on the Tree of Life: A first type of book is the root book.  The tree is already the image of the world, or the root the image of the world-tree. ... But the book as a spiritual reality, the Tree or Root as an image, endlessly develops the law of the One becomes two, then of the two that becomes four (ATP p.5)..."

Here they bring up tree structures within rhizomes and vice versa:  There exist tree or root structures in rhizomes; conversely, a tree branch or root division may begin to burgeon within a rhizome.  The coordinates are determined not by theoretical analyses implying universals but by a pragmatics composing multiplicities or aggregates of intensities.  A new rhizome may form in the heart of a tree, the hollow of a root, the crook of a branch. (ATP p. 15)  The second sentence of this quote gives a good instruction for magick and qabalah users.  This next quote about music applies as well to the formation of correspondences upon the Tree of Life: "Music has always sent out lines of flight, like so many "transformational multiplicities" even overturning the very codes that structure or arborify it; that is why musical form, right down to it's ruptures and proliferations, is comparable to a weed, a rhizome.  (ATP p. 11-12)

More great advice and indicative of how numbers work in qabalah: The number is no longer a universal concept measuring elements according to their emplacement in a given dimension, but has itself become a multiplicity that varies according to the dimensions considered. (ATP p.8)  Compare that with "Every number is infinite; there is no difference," the paradoxical fourth line in Crowley's The Book of the Law.

Next up: Qabalah and The Plane of Immanence