././

"Though he speaks of the most horrible things, the fierceness of his respect lends him a subtle decency."

Jacques Riviere, Etudes quoted on Baudelaire, in The Arcades Project.

Note to self; Pipifax and Panlo - eccentric acrobat act.

Even your thread title is enigmatic

>4 baswood: agree, and I love it!
It needs no member name :)

bas, detail how nice to see you here.....

I was thinking about a track to give substance or colour to this section of our onward trek.

I have come down to a choice of two:

This:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miiX5NQZrek

or this, which I shamefully neglected to post once before as I felt it would be too harsh.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_vT1m98Y44

Any takers?

Zeno - you are a tricky guy! Almost missed your new thread.

The second link doesn't quite square with my mental image of you.

Hi Suzanne - thanks for dropping by. Glad you found me.

I am increasingly interested in more unusual, industrial sounds. Sounds as 'filler', sounds on the border, the extremity of sounds.

The space between things fascinates me, and sometimes the more outlying of these spaces require an appropriate soundtrack.

Pipifax and Panlo - I have had an ongoing but occasional search for information about these 2. A duo in the days of Music Hall.

I have recently come across a reference to them as an eccentric acrobat act.

The brochure for the Royal Variety Performance of 1912 has the two at the top of the list of performers; and a scan of the May-June 1965 edition of Bandwagon tells us that Panlo was one of only 6 trampolining artistes who could, in 1910, "... execute the acrobatic feat in which a tumbler executes the round-off, flip-flap and double back somersault on the ground."

They were a 'speciality act', an act other than the comedians or singers....jugglers, strongmen, proponents of the diabolo.

It seems clear that at least one was a trained acrobat - Panlo must have been at the very forefront. What of Pipifax? A comedic presence, a straight 'man' for Panlo to bounce off (so to speak)?

The only other clue is this:



The second Mrs Pipifax. Pipifax was presumably Panlo's partner and wife. Intriguingly, she was the second Mrs Pipifax.

Butcher Claws will scare the punters away.

I find myself attracted to extreme sounds in music, but not so much industrial stuff. Extreme avant garde jazz, extreme metal, or extreme orchestral.

Extreme orchestral Bas?

Thinking more about the case for the defence for Butcher Claws. I see a link with my quote in #1: the fierceness of his respect lends him a subtle decency.

For those who last beyond the first couple of minutes the track mutates with the addition of a brass band. I see it as a musical homage to 'up north' - the north of the England (different accents, culture, geography, employment prospects, even ethnicity) with the start giving a musical interpretation of the industrial mills and the brass band illustrating the working class response by instilling a certain culture that was theirs and theirs alone....

I have decided that my thread title is 2 swimmers in the middle distance, pointing to the heavens. Too far away to hear any verbal message they may be trying to impart.

I'm glad you clarified your thread title, zeno. Somehow I thought it was a modernist rendering in Morse code, or an abstract of Bart Simpson looking very surprised. Anyway, in the circumstances described the swimmers might have benefited from knowing Morse code.

Extreme orchestral? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4X8AnssoaM&feature=related

"Gustl tells how fish have for him an attraction that is mingled with dread. When he is in the country he spends the first few days in a mad passion for fishing - hour after hour. Then this subsides and comes to a halt in a disgust that borders on horror. As a child he would take the bones of gutted fish, put them in a bowl and stand for hours, staring into it.

He insists that there are people who are attracted by birds and who themselves have something birdlike in their expression; every person, he says, has an animal co-ordinate with which he is connected in some secret, inner way."

Diaries, Robert Musil.

#14 I never liked synchronised swimming even when it became an Olympic sport

#17 Zeno, this reminded me of a passage from 2666 by Roberto Bolano:

And as the fishermen talked, young Hans Reiter's irrepressible curiosity, or madness, which at times made him do things he shouldn't, led him to drop off the boat with no warning and he dove down after the lights or light of those singular fish or that singular fish, and at first the fishermen were not alarmed, nor did they shout or cry out, because they were all aware of young Reiter's peculiarities..........

Andy McKee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tn1d5DmdMqY&feature=fvsr
wild acoustic guitar

Robert Desnos, Surrealism, and the Marvelous in Everyday Life, Katharine Conley.



Desnos was a Dada then Surrealist insider, close friends with Breton until they fell out over the group's close connections with the communist movement.

Desnos was adept in the art of automatic writing, whereby he went into a dreamstate (look at his eyes in any photograph of him at the time!) and wrote or orated an automatic, stream of consciousness line of thought. This was exactly in line with the surrealist love/worship of chance and the importance of unconscious thought....

Desnos' greatest contribution, to my mind, was the set of poems he wrote in the mid 1920s pertaining to his great love, Yvonne George.

Conley's book gives a good (although slightly dry) summary of this period.

The book is also good at Desnos' post surrealist life in radio and as a critic as well as poet.

Desnos worked for the resistance in the war, was betrayed (I think former colleague Drieu La Rochelle was implicated in this), and ended up in Theresienstadt concentration camp, where he died just after liberation by the allied forces.

Shape, colour and magnitude.

Bas, thanks for that extreme orchestral. Interesting concept. My tastes in this area are ephemeral, even shallow (Chopin, Schubert, Schumann...) so cannot comment with any authority. But anything breaking away from business as usual must be a good thing. I admire your wide ranging taste in music - always a good sign.

Tros, welcome. Wild accoustic guitar - is nothing safe! I really love that sound Mckee gets from the guitar. I love the sound of acoustic guitars anyway, although my tastes here are generally more traditional - Ry Cooder, John Fahey, Leadbelly, Robert Pete Williams.... and Leo Kottke.

Bas - sorry to hear of your dislike of synchronised swimming. Is there a cure?

The Bolano quote was a nice taster - I need to get round to him at some stage.

And Rena - your post was very apt. I particularly enjoyed the slight hint of satire. Made me smile.

Check out Dr Caligari's guitar!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OYyIJUTKEI&feature=related

Good piece again, tros. I looked at McKee's version of the same song and think that for me McKee has that something extra in his playing.

zeno, I've been meaning to say how much I love that picture in #2.

27 - Rena yes yes, Heath Robinson. I associate him very much with Wodehouse - the same english eccentricity. However he seems to have almost completely faded from sight over the last 20 years.

If you get the chance to buy one of his books of eccentric inventions it is well worth the money.

my thread title is 2 swimmers in the middle distance, pointing to the heavens
I like that, alot
I also like it as stops and pauses
I like the pairing, and note your messages in this thread mention more romantic pairings than I recall previously…

eta: maybe segues, more than pauses

Very astute re the pairings, hadn't even noticed that myself...

re the swimmers and the pointing and the thread title:

Not waving but drowning

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith

Yes I will go out there
Out there where
I know you can not find me
I held on to the steel rail
Too long now
I know I must let go
Here I am in the ocean
Not waving but drowning
Just a nervous reaction
Please don't rescue me

So cold I can't feel my toes
I'll let them go
Who needs them?
Circulation stand still
H2O can freeze you to the marrow
Learn to love the water
It will love you like there's no tomorrow
There is no tomorrow

Lyrics, 'Not Waving', This Heat, featuring a personal favourite of mine, Charles Hayward.

I won't show the youtube video as it is not for the faint of heart.

Ah! This Heat: my cd database tells me I have a 6cd box set collection called "cold storage." Can't remember ever playing it. Looks interesting though, I'll dig it out.

Zeno, not wishing to state the obvious, but that sounds downright suicidal!!

You must have a huge cd collection bas, to have cds you may have never listened to.

Everything in context Suz.

I suffer from "collection mania" as far as music goes (much more so than books). Much of the stuff I have is in mp3 format. I would say that over 70% of the music I have has not been played yet.

I am a consumer like everybody else.

>36 baswood: I am a consumer like everybody else.

I am relieved to hear that!

I too have some CDs I have not listened to. I went on a tear a few years ago collecting everything John Mark Ainsley ever recorded, and that ended up being over 70 CDs. There are a few I haven't yet gotten to, despite my enthusiasm.

oh I love love love JMA! I envy your collection, Poquette!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkYCSsfpQz8

music by purcell, words by Dryden, JMA's voice and the English consort. Bliss.

What a joy it is to find another JMA enthusiast. I actually met him the last year I was in San Francisco. He was there performing Handel's Jeptha. We corresponded, and I went back to Cleveland to hear him in Mendelssohn's Elija at Severance Hall – an absolutely thrilling musical experience all by itself. I went to England the following year to travel around but the trip was to culminate in a JMA/Lisa Milne joint recital in London. When I reached my hotel that afternoon there were frantic messages from JMA saying the recital had been cancelled because the other singer was indisposed. He suggested that we go out anyway since he had now nothing to do, so he came and collected me at my hotel and we went to a lovely wine bar and had a few drinks, he walked me back to my hotel, and that was that. I've seen him a few times since, and he is an absolutely wonderful young man with the voice of an angel. It has truly been a privilege to know him, to hear him and see sort of from the inside, if you will, how dedicated he is to his art and what a sacrifice it is in so many ways to be a great artist and performer.

oh wow. he sounds like a perfect gentleman.

I particularly love his recordings of Britten's War Requiem. Well, anything he does really is sublime. When you see him again, please tell him he has a big fan in Taiwan!

The unconquered.

More John Fahey. Trance - like simplicity.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSKq_RRC4bE&feature=related

Recently got Slack Key Guitar V 2.
http://www.amazon.com/Slack-Key-Guitar-Various-Artists/dp/B0000E3324/ref=sr_1_1?...
Quite a few interesting players including Sonny Lim.

Never heard of slack key guitar - woeful knowledge! Sounds excellent - Sonny Lim especially. Like Kottke at his most reflective.

Slack key is traditional hawaiian guitar.
You need to get out more, Z.
;-)
Maybe a week in hawaii?
For research, of course.

"Far from me, oh joyous as the flower dancing in the river
on its watery stem, oh sad as seven in the evening in
the mushroom fields.

Far from me still silent as in my presence and still joyous
as the stork - shaped hour falling from on high.

Far from me at the moment the alembics sing, when
the silent and noisy sea curls up on the white pillows."

excerpt, Robert Desnos, If you knew.

Surrealist Painters and Poets, Mary Ann Caws.

Fire

"Essentially a mineral element, fire dwells in stones and eggs. Trembling stones are the ones which, when damp and exposed to sunlight, give the best kind of fire. This is soft, sweet, velvety and perfumed, and is currently used for burning down churches."

Benjamin Peret, excerpt from The Four Elements, Surrealist Painters and Poets.

Benjamin Peret insulting a passing priest.

Kurt Schwitters adopts several facial poses.

45 - yes, a week in Hawaii would be very nice.

Holidays this year:

1 week in August in Normandy
3 weeks in December in New Zealand (where it will be spring/summer)

All to come.

Maybe Hawaii next year...

>47 zenomax:, 48
Peret: a man after my own heart, methinks.

Desnos and Peret were both intrinsically part of the early Surrealist movement in Paris. However, come the parting of the ways with Breton (a fate which happened to many within the group) Desnos took up with Georges Bataille (who was Breton's polar opposite it seems in many ways (1)). Peret, curiously for one with such a robust and churning imagination, stayed loyal to Breton through thick and thin.

(1) "Bataille's fascination with the natural, founded in eroticism, is diametrically opposed to Breton's idealistic and spiritually pure notion of 'elective love'"

Robert Desnos, Surrealism and the marvelous in everyday life, K Conley.

Strangely, reading this section on Desnos' split with the official surrealist group, I actually began to feel some sense of what Andre Breton was about - probably for the first time. I have always seen him as a schemer, someone who had to be at the centre of the group and who had the final say on who was in and who was out. I still believe this is largely the case, but sentences like this bring me closer to him:

"Breton, unlike Desnos, was still seeking a metaphysical spiritual reality, a mysterious unknown, what he would call 'a certain point of mind'... where ' life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.'"

Those faithful readers who have followed my threads over the last few years (well, reader in the singular!) may recall such dichotomies have exercised my (admittedly lesser) mind from time to time too.

Fascinating stuff zeno

Alas, the Surrealists are just off my radar screen, so your comments, Zeno, are very interesting. Wish I could comment more cogently, and eventually hope to become better informed in this department.

Just back from a 3 day walk along the Ridgeway with my son. Fun, but hard going.

Seems quiet around here. Have I missed anything?

Took The rings of saturn for the walk, browsed but never fully read before.

Interesting, as Sebald always is, with some nice thoughts articulated, which I hope to post on soon.

bas and Suzanne - thanks for your comments. You need to sample the Dadaist and Surrealists Suzanne.

fun, but hard going do I detect a lack of fitness. It's always good to read between the lines.

~57 bas, yes you do detect that very thing. As I posted on another thread I am walking like a man 20 years older.

One 5 a side football match a week was the limit of my fitness regime until a fortninght ago when I followed my son into karate. I am theoretically in a squash league but haven't played in almost a year....

Grim's Dyke - an ancient 5 mile raised walkway forming part of the Ridgeway.

nice photo zeno. I know the Ridgeway well, although last time I walked on it I was plagued by young motorcyclists scrambling through the muddy tracks.

Wish I were younger and in better shape. In my heart, I would love to do a 3-day walk, but the body would not survive the trip, alas! Totally unfamiliar with the Ridgeway. Beautiful photo, zeno.

Thanks both. Grim's Dykewas a nice part of the walk, not least as it was tree covered - the shelter was appreciated on a hot day.,

Off work today - gave myself a day to recover. Went into Oxford and purchased 3 Jung related books in prep for a couple of upcoming threads I hope to be involved in.

Psychological Types and Dreams, both by Jung, and Jung the mystic by Gary Lachman. Looking forward to browsing these...

"I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer....What manner of theatre is it, in which we are at once playwright, actor, stage manager, scene painter and audience?"

WG Sebald, The Rings of Saturn.

A couple of recent "re-discoveries" that were both pleasant surprises:
Alex De Grassi - The World is Getting Loud
Leo Kottke - Try and Stop Me

De Grassi doesn't quite do it for me tros.

How about this? RB was, I think, on Fahey's Takoma record label. There is a lot of similarity in their questing, visionary qualities i think.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfomkIqzE4Q&feature=related

Back from a week in Normandy where I partially read The Shape of a city and Jung the Mystic.

Haven't listened to Basho since the 60's in Berkeley. Nice cut.

A couple more recent finds;

Hot Club of San Francisco, a Django revival group.

The Bills, from canada, folk

What I'm listening to at the moment:

Thomas Ligotti:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5fetSoZFyBw

Val Bennett:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS0uw_jat1g

Throbbing Gristle:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVViDUkUfvc

"Those of us who are permanent citizens of the unholy city are neither angels nor demons, although we are sometimes called upon to play such parts for the purpose of some game that has been going on since the world began. Acting out our roles in a drawn out and intricate stage show that we will never understand...." T. Ligotti.

In the midst of reading Gary Lachman's Jung the Mystic it strikes me that reading Jung and Ligotti side by side may be an interesting and fruitful exercise.

tros - you were in Berkeley in the 60s? You must have some interesting first hand musical experiences....

Its amazing that Gensis P Orridge is still going strong. That You tube track is quite tuneful for them. Sounds good to me. I wonder what happened to Cosi

"Those of us who are permanent citizens of the unholy city are neither angels nor demons, although we are sometimes called upon to play such parts for the purpose of some game that has been going on since the world began. Acting out our roles in a drawn out and intricate stage show that we will never understand...." T. Ligotti

God! I just hope I never meet the stage manager.

Did somebody say "Berkeley in the '60s? Yikes! Me too!

is there really a band called Throbbing Gristle, Zeno, or did you make that up?
fabulous name!

#68, #71, #73: Takes me back, that does:



I mean, how could we not love an 'industrial' band* fronted by a woman who called herself Cosey Fanni Tutti?

She's still around: Cosey's homepage.

*(If you look closely, the subtitle of their "Greatest Hits" album is "ENTERTAINMENT THROUGH PAIN")

Cosey's home page - Amazing

Thanks for your comments.

bas - apart from the infamous Butcher Claws I don't believe I have ever caught you off guard with a piece you weren't at least aware of if not heard!

suzanne - another survivor from the 60s front line? What was it like?

Murr - as you can see TG exists (I sometimes worry that you had too sheltered an upbringing)

Bob - how nice to see you here, and many thank yous for pointing out the album subtitle, a nice touch to the album I think.

Jung the Mystic, Gary Lachman



My first Gary Lachman book (he has written several books on the esoteric, the occult and consciousness, including Rudolf Steiner, Swedenborg, and Ouspensky - Gurdjieff's right hand man).

The book suffers from some spelling mistakes, and some of Lachman's sentences are a little stream of consciousness, which I found distracted me from the narrative at times. However his style is generally fluid, interesting, and he is not afraid to give his personal opinion and illustrate from personal experience.

I largely read this on the beach or in the cottage garden whilst on holiday in Normandy and it was a pleasant book. It also threw more light on Jung's personal life and experience. If the book is an accurate reflection of Jung's life, Jung was not a scientist with a mystic trying to get out, but was a mystic who rather thought he ought to be a scientist (Jung was an organised person who liked to do things by the book - 'Herr Doktor Professor' is how Lachman refers to this part of his character).

Some really interesting pieces for me to reflect on in this book - and I can't help but draw references to The Rings of Saturn which I have also been reading.

I'll look to comment further on these things shortly...

Lachman's experience in the outer limits of esoteric thought mean he has knowledge of many interesting minor key characters. One I have been following up is R A Schwaller de Lubicz, whose interest in alchemy and mathematics, and 'inner conversations' appear to place him in the same bracket as Jung.

Nature Word in particular appears of interest.

>76 zenomax: I fear my take on the '60s would ruin your thread! Not really for public consumption . . .

Many great concerts but I missed a lot.
Favs: Cream, 1st am. tour; Youngbloods, Pentangle, Janis and Big Brother, Dead, etc.
I missed Altamont, thank god.

79, 80 - I think you two need to get a thread together - reminiscences from the frontline!

"Nothing is as it appears to be, and nothing is unchanging".

From Shadow Lines by Lorna Martenswhich looks at turn of the 20th century Austrian intellectual and artisitic circles, where much of the impetus towards 20th century modernism began.

I read much of this book and commented upon it in my 2009 thread.

Martens talks about Ernest Mach, Hoffmansthal, Schnitzler, Musil and others exploring 'the boundaries between reality and illusion and permanence and change'.

I think my interest in dichotomies/opposites was stoked by reading this book those few years back. The thought of colliding two opposites together to see what emerges is an interesting one for me.

In the chapter I have just re-read I particulalry like this commentary on Musil which coincides closely with my view of things (as Musil so often does):

"... Musil dwells on the historical and contingent nature of distinctions conventionally regarded as hard and fast. What seems stable, what most people believe is 'the way things are', is really an accident of history, an order that comes into being and coexists with other orders haphazardly and is always threatening to dissolve."

Your Musil quote dovetails nicely with my own view, as expressed so succinctly by Julian Barnes, that

"History isn't what happened. History is just what historians tell us. . . . Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap, strange links, impertinent connections. We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them."

>82 zenomax: my interest in dichotomies/opposites {...} The thought of colliding two opposites
An interest of mine also. I enjoy reversals and moments of revelation, especially the shock of opposites that are rooted in sameness.

83, 84 - birds of a feather!

84 dm - do you know what your myers briggs type might be?

zeno I "test" more balanced than I feel* I am (I've held a lot of roles that developed me), but in the wild and to use the Myers Briggs term preferences (ie innate facility) I'm a strong ISTJ. I think the "sensing" leads to marked revelations -- some info, more info, finally a tipping point where everything comes together. (Sometimes the coming together prompts a "duh!")

*er, I guess that should be "think"

an amusing sentence which came upon me while I was washing dishes earlier this evening:

"The rich hunger for justice"

only when someone has stolen their money

detail - ISTJ is interesting. I am more often than not assumed to be an ISTJ by others. dan also is an ISTJ (hope he doesn;t mind me saying) and I often feel I have the same opinion of many things as he does.

I think there must be a lot of common overlap between ISTJs and we INTJs.

bas - you're quick tonight!

Z - Catching up. Regarding #89 I certainly don't mind you mentioning my Myers Briggs type. It's been an eye-opener by the way, although not one I'm fully comfortable with.

91 dan - was an eye opener for me too, and lead me into Jung and the outer realms of things.

>89 zenomax: I think Myers-Briggs is more about one’s process/style of thinking/communicating than the content. You do seem a strong I; probably an S; unsure whether F or T. But this thread seems the work of a P not J -- a comfort with ambiguity, tangents, the search.

Back to Shadow Lines which, as I mentioned previously, I read in 2009. One of the key themes was the emergence at turn of the 20th centurty of the idea of 2 irreconcilable opposites (such as the conscious and unconscious, as publicised by Freud and others).

Now in Lachman's book Jung the mystic it is argued that Jung saw in alchemy a 'reconciliation of the opposites leading to some new, unknown development'.

I wonder if this was a fundamental difference between Freud and Jung - Freud saw reality as stasis - where two conflicting realities existed but rarely touched. Jung saw conflict between opposites as a dynamic, leading to some thing new. Freud saw things as staid but threatening, Jung saw things as ever changing with positive outcomes as possible as negative...

93 'this thread seems a work of a P not J' - I think it might be more about the change one reaches in middle age (it still pains me to write those last 2 words) when one turns to ones weaker functions.

I am INTJ but have changed in outlook over the last 4 or 5 years. Reason and scepticism is still strong, but I am comfortable now with other ways of looking at things. The esoteric and the Jungian world view holds a lot of interest for me right now.

For some reason this made me think of you:

"I leaf through now one book, now another," he wrote, "without order and without plan, by disconnected fragments."

—How to Live: Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer by Sarah Bakewell

96 - I can't really dispute that Suz - not too far from the truth.

ETA: but for the avoidance of all possible doubt I am definitely a 'J'.

The Pitmen's Requiem, Peter Crookston



A piece of social history.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l08urM-oWLc

The annual Durham miner's gala, from 1962.

Brass brands, marching, dancing. A day to look forward to in the working class calendar, with the bands (each mining lodge at one time had its own brass band) playing upbeat, holiday music. At 2.20 in the film there is a change in atmosphere - a quiet air of expectancy. At around 2.30 a different tune starts playing. As this tune wends its way the crowd - miners and their families, and the dignitaries on the speakers' dias (including a young Tony Benn) exhibit a change of mood- a mixture of pride, sadness, remembrance.

The tune is 'Gresford', also know as the miners' hymn. It was written by a Durham miner to commemorate a mining disaster in Gresford, Wales, in 1934. The crowd of 1962 would have also remembered back to the recent Durham mine disaster - at Easington colliery in 1951, only 11 years previous.

The Durham miner who wrote 'Gresford' was Robert Saint.

This book was written ostensibly about him. The author, Peter Crookston, knew Saint slightly as a child. Cookston was born and raised in a Durham mining village, but long ago moved to London where he was a journalist at the Observer and the Sunday Times. The book Crookston has written is about Saint and his composition 'Gresford' but as Crookston returns to Durham to find out more he also comes into contact with many former miners, union officials and their families. As such, the book becomes as much a social and political history of the Durham mining villages and their inhabitants. A requiem for what had been and what was left, for past battles against mine owners, against well meaning but officious Labour party councillors, and finally against the government and police as the communities were finally sent on their way into history by the Conservative government of the 1980s.

The Pitmen's requiem looks interesting zeno.

99 - yes, unusually for me I read it from start to finish, and over the course of just a week!

Continuing the miner theme, Saturday I visited London to watch the first 2 of the 4 Days of Hope films showing at the BFI Southbank. All 4 were be shown over the course of about 10 hours.

A bonus was having Paul Copley introduce the films and explain how he was selected to play one of the main characters.

This was something of an event as the series of films, first shown on the BBC in 1975, have not been seen in the UK since 1978. No DVD has ever been made of them.

When bees swarm:

"This is a day, I repeat, when a spirit of holiday would seem to animate these mysterious workers, a spirit of confidence, that apparently nothing can trouble. They have detached themselves from the wealth they had to defend, and they no longer recognize their enemies. They become inoffensive because of their happiness, though why they are happy we know not, except it be because they are obeying their law. A moment of such blind happiness is accorded by nature at times to every living thing, when she seeks to accomplish her end."

Maeterlinck, The Life of the bee.

Bloody heck! This is 45 years ago:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wViHq8hg_go&feature=related

..........................

Joni Mitchell = INFJ.

I was thinking that I still have this on vinyl, but it's the Judy Collins version I have. Loved her explanation of the lyrics. Now I understand . . .

AH the inimitable Joni. She never did get that guitar remotely in tune, but her vocals were excellent.
I am a great fan. Her album Hejira is one of my all time favourites.

For bas. Hejira was, I think, the second JM album I bought after Blue

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMFQtnd0amc

Bob's Lane; Edward Thomas

Women he liked, did shovel-bearded Bob,
Old Farmer Hayward of the Heath, but he
Loved horses. He himself was like a cob
And leather-coloured. Also he loved a tree.

For the life in them he loved most living things,
But a tree chiefly. All along the lane
He planted elms where now the stormcock sings
That travellers hear from the slow-climbing train.

Till then the track had never had a name
For all its thicket and the nightingales
That should have earned it. No one was to blame
To name a thing beloved man sometimes fails.

Many years since, Bob Hayward died, and now
None passes there because the mist and the rain
Out of the elms have turned the lane to slough
And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob's Lane.

Back down to earth with Edward Thomas - nice one

So, who is this Edward Thomas? The Touchstones are opaque with names written over them. I am moved by the poem.

Robert

Robert - yes Edward Thomas was a writer and critic who came to poetry late (in his 30s). Unfortunately he came to poetry in 1914/15. He enlisted as a volunteer, kept a war diary which noted the birdlife and the monotony, and was killed in 1917.

His writing pre poetry was often about the countryside and his poetry shows a deep affinity with the land and country ways.

A long term favourite.

Existential angst, verging on the nihilistic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emHZ2oj8wDk&feature=related

Elm leaf.

My favourite tree is the elm.

110: If he had a good book, he wouldn't mind waiting around.

I wonder if he would tend toward Camus or Zane Grey?

Camus, but he'd read it in a cowboy hat and boots in the darkest corner of a saloon.

I see he's been covered by Roland S. Howard. I'll have to check that out.

Daimonic messengers within, across or beyond the ether.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39EmS02J98Q

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcRnEywlWfI&feature=related

Interesting and a bit creepy, Z! http://www.spynumbers.com/YosemiteSam.html

I'd say 73% interesting, 24% creepy slick.

The repeating, metronomic aspect reminds one of:

Robert Ashley

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqhCv5oZ_cA

The Philosopher's Secret Fire, Patrick Harpur.



Lo, the phosporescent trails we weave,
when first we practice to believe..

Your touchstone goes to Harry Potter. The book is here: The Philosopher's Secret Fire.

Robert

interesting, Zeno, was it good?

Thank you Mr Durick.

Although I think in the grand scheme of things both The Philosopher's Secret Fire and Harry Potter come out in roughly the same quadrant (the upper left one, all is linked, but we know not how).

Yes, very good Murr, although I don't know what to write about it yet, as I am processing the messages. Certainly an eye opener into that third way between established religion and established rationality/science. Neither the Pope nor Richard Dawkins would like this book (although, curiously, it seems the Catholic & Orthodox churches are more accommodating than the Protestant church which sees rationalism and a literal view of life as the only way forward).

It is a chain (the alchemists' Golden Chain of knowledge) which runs through Plato, the Gnostics, the Neoplatonists, Blake (with his 'double vision'), Dee, Bruno, Keats & Coleridge, Yeats & Auden (who was very attuned to these things) and of course Jung.

It establishes in my mind what I had already long suspected - Jung was not a scientist as he claimed, but one within this long line of mystics and shamen. What Harpur argues in this book is that that is indeed a good thing - those who take a scientific/literal view of the world miss out on the subtle shades of imagination - where daimons mediate between gods, archetypes & ourselves (as represented by our egos).

That is just a stream of conscious disgorging of the mass of intermingled thoughts I have on this. There needs to be a period of more reflection on my part I believe before I can add anything vaguely sensible...

I've added it to my waiting-for-the-paperback wishlist.

Thanks,

Robert

yes, thanks Zeno, the reference to Auden helped me to put it in some kind of context. I'll look out for this one too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-WYC4zS44A&feature=related

Everything in itself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fff27QthVdE&list=LL6A10G59WSC-da_3fDAvXlA&amp...

Zeno, a move away from the industrial to the Dark Ambient? I really liked that extract from the Cut Hands cd. Is it my imagination or do I detect a rhythmic pulse in certain sections of this track. I have listened to other tracks from this and I am tempted to add it to my collection.

There is so much going on in Harpur's book, so many ideas and attempted connections that I cannot begin to give a decent overview. Harpur has written about such things before, and an internet search shows that he and his wife also run residential courses in this area. So it is something he lives day to day.

It feels that this book is an attempt to bring the whole panoply together - from Plato, the archetypes, Darwin and his conflict with Nature, Yeats who Harpur uses to illustrate imagination (it is not an abstract thing which allows us to 'conjure up' images which are not evident to our senses, but rather a 'whole world' - in fact an otherworld, peopled by daimons and with a life of its own - independent of us.....)

My world has always been split between the real world and my imagination. As a fully paid up member of the 99% club - I spend 99% of my time and energy in my mind - what imagination nreally is becomes of some importance to me. I have always believed that there were 2 worlds - the outside world I see and hear and smell, and the world of my mind, seemingly much more complex and less rational than the real world, but one where I am more at home. What Jung's concept of the collective unconscious implied was that this world of the imagination was not mine alone, but shared in some way with others. Harpur adds flesh to this by stating that in fact throughout history this has always been the case.

Harpur hits on another related area of interest to me - the idea that humankind cannot control their world, no matter how hard they seek to discover rules to measure and laws to describe and hence 'own' nature.

Mankind previously sought to placate the gods by what Harpur describes as 'the ancient laws of sympathy and correspondence'. Harpur argues that the literalism of post enlightenment rational/literal society (he includes the established western religions as well as science) has discredited these 'ancient laws' and yet, he believes, these ancient ways were in fact '...profound psychic principles which express the way each microcosm - each of us - potentially reflects and participates in the entire cosmos.'

This thought first crystallised in my mind when I read Balzac 2 or 3 years ago. Balzac seemed to be able to create the characters of an infinite variety of people from pauper to royalty, yet they all inhabited a world in which life was a case of going where the fates took you. It seemed to me that Balzac understood humankind but an offshoot of that understanding was that humankind's universe could not be mastered. The multiplicity of minor causal events in day to day life could never be understood or captured by any one person so how could the whole world, the whole universe be understood?

I am not sure how much of a gnostic or neo platonist Balzac was - I think he rather intuitively understood how things were, without adhering to the third path which Harpur posits. I have much sympathy with this Balzacian view - perhaps greater than anything Harpur can convince me about at this time and this place.

In his essay 'The Hedgehog and the Fox' Isaiah Berlin comes close to claiming a similar outlook for Tolstoy - that supreme example of a rationalist who moves over time, and against his nature, towards a spiritual view of life:

"According to Tolstoy all our knowledge is necessarily empirical - there is no other - but it will never conduct us to true understanding, only to an accumulation of arbitarily abstracted bits and pieces of informtion..."

Berlin adds a kind of epitaph for Tolstoy, part of which is quoted below, and which seems appropriate given Harpur's view of the world:

"Tolstoy was the least superficial of men: he could not swim with the tide without being drawn irresistably below the surface to investigate the darker depths below..."

The nature of Harpur's daimons are also interesting. Whereas their post enlightenment counterparts - demons - who are always bad if not evil, daimons are ambiguous - sometimes good, sometimes bad, sometimes just contrary. They remind me of Kafka's messengers, and of Thing 1 & Thing 2 from Dr Zeuss.



Russian thinkers, Isaiah Berlin

Balzac - to understand Balzac I think you need only read the few relevant sentences in Baudelaire's essay on Gautier. Baudelaire understands him - in the way you understand someone of similar spirit.

Of Balzac's unique abilites he mentions, amongst others, his ability to delve into ordinary characters and lives '...enabling him, with a complete mastery of touch, to clothe pure triviality in light and purple....'

Enjoyed your postings zeno. some interesting thoughts.

I have increasingly come to the conclusion that I don't control anything and that it is foolish to try. As for trying to control another person...........well!

Thanks bas. Yes, I live with my wife and a 12 year old son, neither of whom I have a hope of controlling. Subtle influence over time is the best I can hope for! But even that works both ways - I have opened the door a fraction to spirituality (only a fraction, mind) as a result of my wife's influence.

125 - yes, definitely some rhythym - the album is Afro Noises so suggests somewhat where the background influences might be.

.....temporary autonomous zones....

"Analogical 'thinking' is the way in which the imagination chooses to structure itself. It is also a fundamental characteristic of imagination's primary products: myths. By understanding something of how myths work, and according to what rules, we shall understand better how imagination works and therefore what the human soul is like." Patrick Harpur, The Philosopher's Secret Fire.

Imagination, as Harpur uses the term, is another word for Plato's World Soul or Jung;s collective unconscious. The human soul is here our own individual unconscious.

The years when I was pursuing my inner images were the most important in my life - in them everything essential was decided. It all began then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of the material that burst forth from the unconscious, and at first swamped me. It was the prima materia for a lifetime's work."

Jung confirms his place in the mystic tradition, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHwr5T70IxI&feature=BFa&list=LL6A10G59WSC...

The other side of belief.

The other side of belief or back to the industrial. I made it throughj 2 mins of this clip.

What's happened to your staying power bas?

Wow, thanks for the Edward Thomas, zenomax.

Z, I have missed you thread for too long. Very interested in the Harpur and all you posts him.

141 - any time Bob. One can never have too much of him, I find.

142 - dan - very interesting, not least in the light of the upcoming testament read. Should provide a nice contrast.

Heath Robinson - a device for catching German bombs falling on London.

Interesting how things lead to other things....

Heath Robinson lead me to think about David Low, a New Zealand born cartoonist who also worked through the second world war. Low was anti appeasement, anti establishment, but most bitingly anti Hitler and Mussolini. His cartoon characterisations of them lead me to this:

the Sonderfahndungsliste G.B.

I wonder who would be on the opposite list - unserealliiertenliste - those secretly suspected or known to be sympathetic to the Nazi cause, waiting patiently for the coming invasion?

A David Low cartoon where Goebbels appears to be a small monkey on Herr Hitler's shoulder.

So much is packed into that cartoon!

Yes, Low was no hack.

He had a clear idea in his mind of the backstory before he drew the image.

Hey Zeno, been away for a while and just catching up. Your quotes from Harpur and Jung remind me that I must get to the Harpur book soon. I read Memories, Dreams and Reflections way back when my interest in Jung was first kindled. That would be an interesting reread at this point.

Glad to see you back Suzanne.

Keep a look out for a thread PW and I plan for early 2012 on personality types, Jung, and more....

zeno, I missed this thread until now. I can't catch up on it all - but have you heard The Miners' Hymn by Johann Johannsson? The film you posted isn't avaialble now, wondering if it is the one the music as used in.