Amiri Baraka Reads at the 4th Charles Olson Lecture 10/19/13 Pt. 2

Starseed Transmissions intersection point: July 23

Starseed Transmission intersection point

The following are some notes i made while revisiting the RAW high weirdness around the date July 23, 1973, and some of the influences and experiments he mixed together during those weeks.

Astral Projective Verse: Olson, Ophiel and Sun Ra

Astral Projective Verse

By Steve Fly Agaric 23

For Eric Wagner and John Sinclair. Thanks for inspiring these wild speculations which are really notes that shall be reshuffled into a more coherent whole at some future point.

"The essay introduces his ideas of “composition by field” through projective or open verse, which is a continuation of the ideas of poets Ezra Pound, who asked poets to “compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome,” and William Carlos Williams, who proposed in 1948 that a poem be approached as a “field of action.” Olson’s projective verse focuses on “certain laws and possibilities of the breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings.” --Poetry Foundation, introduction to Projective Verse.

"This book, an occult book, deals with the subject of how to enter this Astral plane, function there, and then return to the physical plane, with a great deal of memory-knowledge of the “trip” retained in the memory and available for study and research. This book is a practical Occult book in that it gives all the theory necessary to understand the subject AND THE DEFINITE DIRECTION PRACTICES AS HOW TO DO IT.--Orphiel, The Art of AstraProjection.

"Music is a plane of wisdom, because music is a universal language, it is a language of honor, it is a noble precept, a gift of the Airy Kingdom, music is air, a universal existence … common to all the living. Music is existence, the key to the universal language. Because it is the universal language.--Sun Ra, The Neglected Plane of Wisdom (1966)

Astral Planes And New Moon Beams by Sun Ra (at discogs)

Astral Source History

The system of projective verse as defined by Charles Olson and the magical occult Art of Astral Projection, here as defined by Orphiel, twist themselves together to produce astral projected verse, a new kind of magical poetics, or roughly a poetic technique to remote-view (using the astral body) the spaces and places and the time period under investigation. 

I have dabbled with some of these ideas in a previous writing project called Open Source History. I created a target area based upon 48 hours of historical time set between July 31st and August 1st 1936. I picked this date due to the special intersection point that I perceived here based upon the life-span of characters from 'the tale of the tribe,' as defined by Robert Anton Wilson, who was 4 in 1936. William Butler Yeats and James Joyce were alive, so were Marshall McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller, Claude Shannon, Norbert Weiner, Ezra Pound, Orson Welles and Alfred Korzybski. This group of innovative critters who exerted a special IMPACT on Dr Wilson are pulled into a fictional vortex of history spread over 48 hours.

The ideas and innovations from the individuals are projected into the historical period under observation by using another fictional tool: tribetablism. An occult system of astral projection based up utilizing the instruments and sensibility of a disc jockey, the discs in this case contain the speech of the tribe or the speech of the historical characters, together with sounds effects and embellishments more conventionally associated with the art and craft of the DJ. The tribetable method takes a lot from the Enochian Vision Magick as defined by Lon Milo Duquette, and is the tool by which the historical tale is telling itself. The novel cuts between occult astral projecting DJs in 2012, and the targets from 1936: New York, Rapallo, Berlin. 

Pound, Olson, Baraka

At the time of writing this novel in 2008 I had not yet come across the essay by Charles Olson, Projective verse. Since discovering this essay and reading it over due to encouragement by my friend John Sinclair, I became convinced that it embodies much of what RAW was getting at, in particular the influence of Ezra Pound and to a lesser extent James Joyce. 

Furthermore, I have recently been moved by the passing of poet Amiri Baraka and tuned back to one of his recent lectures, drawing insightful parallels between the work of Charles Olson and of Sun Ra. Listening back to the lecture, i was stunned by his description of Projective Verse by Olson and how much it resonated with 'process oriented' ideas explored by RAW. 'I see no nouns, I only see verbs.' Bucky said.

I was moved to reshape some ideas of Ernest Fenollosa, Pound and Yeats around what Baraka was saying about Olson and Sun Ra. Projective verse seems to be a very important document and resource for research into the tale of the tribe, and thankfully, unlike many of the other gigantic texts, Projective verse is relatively short, super concise and generally optimistic and informative. It lays down another way in/out of the vortex, a way to navigate the maelstrom of thought and language and action in the world we dream in. The lineage of Projective verse and trajectory into history from that point of publication in 1950 demonstrates how strong and time-tested the contents are. 

I mean to say that Projective Verse is still NEWS today in 2014, its power and dormant potentials expanding at an exponential rate, and i wish to add a little something to that by presenting the concept of astral projected verse. I should add that within the context of the myth, magic and music of Sun Ra, astral projected verse resonates with him more than any other musician either living or dead. 

We have the costume of the historical figure Maximus, put on by Olson and projected into his local space-time manifold, and we have the literal costumes of Sun Ra and his band, put on by Ra and projected into the performance space. Both these systems of using costume could be compared with Yeats and his descriptions and investigations of masks. 'The nature of reality is the reality of masks'. And let’s not forget the brilliant Novel by RAW called 'Masks of the Illuminati' that further explores costume, theatre, drama and layers of identity, with special focus on James Joyce, Albert Einstein and Aleister Crowley.

Astral Planes Language APL

Astral Projection is a psychological magickal technique and has many different variations and no single inventor or definitive text. Unlike projective verse, Astral Projection as far as i am aware is not such a popular field of interest to poets, probably due to its renaming and adoption by many fringe groups as remote viewing, many fringe groups that included intelligence agencies around the world, such as those from Russia, America and England. There are lots of publications based around remote viewing and secret government projects and so called psychic spies, there is also a Hollywood blockbuster movie about some of these events in the USA, called 'Men who stare at goats'. All the drama of psychic spies, clandestine magickal operations and the possible global hidden hand of spooks with special powers can divert the focus from the art and craft of Astral Projection itself.

As with all and any technology, both physical and psychological it can be used to forward the shared resources and knowledge base of all-around-the-world humanity, or used to constrict, consume and paralyse humanity. Astral Projection provides a tool that can be used for an infinite variety of uses.

You may have noticed that i am talking about Astral Projection as if i know for sure that it works, which may bring much contention from armies of skeptics, critics and the ignorant who, as with the argument against full legalization and availability of drugs, would never try, and have never tried, the things they are so certain are so dangerous and threatening to life.

Anybody who has an active imagination and a healthy inquisitive mind can bypass this kind of bigoted ignorance, and recognize it in most authority figures and systems of control. Some may see how the language used to project the authority of knowing, itself, is a mechanism used to distort the picture, frame the information and prevent those trapped in linguistic cells from realizing the infinite flux of being, out there, beyond language...ish

I am biased though, i must confess, after seeking and devouring the works of Robert Anton Wilson i have practiced the arts and crafts of positive thinking and critical analysis, resulting in a high sensitivity to my own projections, a kind of general awareness that 'I'  like every other 'I' cannot know everything, for example. I mean to say, i feel humble to the fact that everything you and 'I' know is wrong, yet i do not feel nihilist and serious enough about this to throw the baby out with the bath water.

To use the imagination, in tandem with the scientific reasoning faculty of the mind-body-language interface to get out there beyond language. Into telepathy, faster than light, everywhere and nowhere at once, the paradox of time-travel etc etc. Into the paradox, and out through the side door, taking bits and pieces of whatever the individual might think can help them on their journey, on the road of life to discover for themselves what the hell is going on. 

I think Astral Projection, in particular, is the kind of future technology that can really level the playing field regarding the age long questions about the individual and the state. The walls between the world in here and the perceived world out there are pulled down, if and when an individual can ignite the infinite potentials of the human mind-body interface and no longer be limited by the physical location of the body, able to travel anywhere, anytime, see and possibly act upon other psychic entities. The internet is a good metaphor that shapes one aspect of astral projection, or travelling the space ways in search of information, yet maybe with a hidden longing for a sense of experience, for an extra-sense of being there. 

Can you distinguish the boundary between your astral plane and your physical plane, where one starts and the other ends? A good place to start thinking about astral projected verse is to look at your own belief-system, how it is constructed, and why. This leads me back to the beginning of this essay. The mixture of ideas and methods from Projective Verse by Charles Olson with techniques and approaches to Astral Projection by Orphiel, topped off with the Astral jazz music of Sun Ra. Together, i believe that these three disciplines can produce some innovative, state of the art, poetic technology capable of handing individuals the free tools for self liberation, and for gaining agency in the world around them.

“the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE”--Charles Olson, Projective Verse.

--Steve Fly
Amsterdam

The Tale of the 'Dog' Tribe

The Tale of the Dogon?
By Steve 'fly agaric 23' Pratt, June 21st 2010. Amsterdam

"First you were Nomad, next you were Namar, now you're Numah and it's soon you'll be Nomon. –James Joyce, FW, pg. 374.

Introduction.
After another 24 hours of reflection on my writing and ideas blogged here, how they were formulated, where they came from, and how much 'value' they have, how much 'truth? I have been cast on a whirlwind journey through memories and some forgotten texts, and landed myself in the thick of the Sirius mystery, Cosmic Trigger, Finnegans Wake and the 'Space' philosophy and music of SUN RA.

This blog is my attempt to track my thoughts and ideas as they grow, and here I'm writing an introduction to navigate and update my ideas. It may help to know that I first wrote out 3000 words describing my thoughts and experiences on the Summer Solstice, and then went back into some reference books and web searching to add exhibits to my thoughts.

This process of sourcing out particular areas of interest 'words' and 'phrases' resulted in a massive influx of new directions and links between my original subject matter. I new of places that I wanted to search because of the words, but the extra information surrounding these investigative nodes, the page numbers and the 'illustrations' help to waft my initial sparks, and fan them--like bellows--into a firey synthesis. --Steve fly, 22nd June, 2010. 2.00P.M


Roots Festival Encounters of the Tuvan kind

Yesterday, 20th June 2010; I stepped outside my front door into the roots festival held just a few meters away from where I live in Oosterpark Amsterdam. I did not plan going to the festival and more or less stumbled upon the band HANGGAI soundchecking while strolling with a friend around the park, early on in the day. I stuck around for their full performance and this led to a longest day epiphany for me. Triggering a flurry of ideas and connections between my favourite things. Let me try to explain.

When I lived in San Francisco I was fortunate to be introduced to Tuvan music and culture from two sources, the first was via a close friend describing the enduring story behind ‘Ghengis Blues: a collaborative album between an American Bluesman and a Tuvan throat singer, the high pitched part of the ‘throat singing’ struck my memory nodes, evoking the Massive Attack tune, Karmacoma.

The second source of my initial interest in Tuvan throat singing and music was Via the great 20th century scientific genius: Richard Feynman, close friends and work associates of mine were friends with Feyman, and I picked up on the ‘Tuvan’ musical interests of his, somewhat. He played drums and had a flare for art, music and poetry that I found attractive for a nanotechnologist and Nobel Prize winning scientist.

My only other encounter with Tuvan throat singing, or Tuvan anything, since my trip to America ten years ago, was just a month back at the ‘Firey Tongues’ festival, held at the beautiful T.A.Z called Ruigoord. Where I believe that along with a stunning ‘Tuvan Throat singing’ solo performance there was a reading from a newly translated ‘text’ from Tuva, as usual I did not pay full attention to that performance, but was instantly struck by the ‘Tuvan’ meme bouncing back into my mind, that got me to thinking and talking a little about ‘Ghengis Blues’ and Richard Feynman and my experiences.

Only a matter of hours ago I was once again confronted with that unmistakable sound of ‘Throat singing’ like a whistle into phase shift resulting in an almost electronic ‘ static’ in the air. The band HANGGAI played a full array of instruments, drums, guitar, bass, flute, vocals and various other stringed instruments I am unfamiliar with.

During the performance I noticed a lady dancing, spinning, leaping and twirling around to the music, who I thought was moving with the music just perfectly, and made me smile, made me think and wish I would have the confidence to get up and dance like that in the early afternoon. When the show came to a close I sat under the Big Top tent, watching the stage and the festival smiles, taking in the good vibes. The dancing lady was close by with her friends and so I said ‘thankyou for dancing and the good vibes’. She kindly then began to explain a little about Tuvan music to me, and that she was from Mali, I did my Ghenghis Feyman rap, and we were sharing our admiration for ‘Tuva’ and ‘Nepal’ and indigenous music in general I suppose.

After a few minutes of conversation I learn that the lady I am talking with was the wife of the great Ali Farka Toure’ (1939-2006) and the people she is with are some of her family, her words suddenly take on an extra richness and ‘truth’ in describing Mali, and the beauty of ‘travel’. But alas, after a few moments we were swept back into the festival and unable to continue our conversation, and unfortunately unable to catch her name, but ‘Ali Farka Toure’ sure stuck with me, I am familiar with his music in part from playing and spending time with Guitarist Fareed Haque of Garaj Mahal, who incorporates much West African music into his playing, and invariably some critters surrounding Fareed and the band turned me onto Ali Farka Toure’.

I did not get chance to launch into my Garaj Mahal rap, or any other rap, and due to this my mind was reeling, thinking I must write, write this out out here in a blog as an introduction to the following synthesis between areas of my ongoing research and study into Myth, Magic and Music.

Shortly after leaving the show I sat alone on a bench rolled a joint and started to read the book I grabbed off the shelf yestermorn’ for any reading opportunities that present themselves: “The Way Of The Sacred by Sir Francis Huxley. Who I once heard lecture on indigenous knowledge and culture at the Prophets Conference, Santa Fe, Ten years ago. While flipping through the book I stumbled upon Dogon, and suddenly right there where I was sitting it all came together in a flash.

Finnegans Wake and the Dogon Nommo Cosmic Trigger fired by Sun Ra and His Intergalactic Arkestra.

(*F26*)I forget to) bolt the thor. Auden. Wasn't it just divining that dog of a dag –James Joyce, FW, pg. 279

Ah, well not yet, I would like to take more caution when entering into these waters, and try to outline ‘why’ the things I write about here are meaningful to me and ‘why’ I feel they are meaningful and worth communicating to others.

I have read Cosmic Trigger by Robert Anton Wilson as recently as 2009, and several times before that, and I read Finnegans Wake almost daily, and often aloud. Sun Ra and his Arketra can be found throughout my DJ sets from over the last twelve years, and since being fortunate to build a close friendship with Sun Ra scholar and associate; John Sinclair, I’ve taken on an extra literary, cultural and multimedia appreciation of Sun Ra and got into a good chunk of his prolific output as composer, arranger, bandleader, poet and visionary futurist.

“Their cosmology is one of the most complicated ever to be recorded in print, and it begins, as does the Hindu cosmogony, with an egg—the Egg of Amma, the name Amma signifying God and meaning “to hold tight,” “to arrange.” –Sir Francis Huxley, The Way Of The Sacred, pg. 94.

James Joyce, Robert Anton Wilson and Sun Ra are arguably complex individuals of a special genius, and as three individuals I am somewhat familiar with I would like to propose a synthesis of these three artists in the form of a short story. And along the way use extensive footnotes and hyperlinks to exploit some of their ideas, while sticking with my own ‘synchronistic’ encounters and experiments as guides to what to include and what to...

Dogon.

“This stone is an ark because it is the foundation stone on which the earth is created. It has its own number, 60, the number of years that elapse between celebrations of the Dogon foundation ceremony. Upon it, in Dogon cosmology, the House of Amma descends as a granary and as a spinning whorl. The granary has a round base and a square top, associated with the numbers four and six respectively. It is the mirror image of its heavenly prototype, which has a square base and a round top. This reversal, in which the inside also becomes the outside, takes place during the descent, which is made down the rainbow, in a sevenfold spiral. Here the spinning whorl enters the Dogon picture. –Sir Francis Huxley, The Way of The Sacred, Pg 166.

The Dogon are a West African culture with a remarkably refined and celebrated history, mythology, astrology and culture in the west that has led some researchers to propose strong cases backed up by various evidence suggesting that they were visited by advanced beings or that they contacted other intelligences and managed to preserve some of this special advanced knowledge in their language, culture and rituals.

When I visited Berkeley in 2000 AD, I attended an unforgettable and important conference held in the Presidio called Planetworkers: Information technology and Global Ecology. This event was a kind of nodal point for me, a place where I witnessed presentations and presenters that were ahead of their time, I thought, folks like Bruce Sterling, Mark Pesce, Peter Russel, Ralph Abraham, Erik Davis and many more of that genius calibre, a special combination of West Coast intellectual optimism and techno-shamanism. Terence Mckenna was scheduled to be at Planetworkers 2000 but had died only weeks earlier, his life and work were acknowledged and celebrated at the conference that, thankfully made space for the psychedelic components to ‘consciousness’ research and psychedelic studies. Always a good thing I think, especially when combined with intellectual genius and cutting edge technology, such as ‘the world wide web’.

Between presentations were a selection of music al offerings, some of which featured a Bass player called Kai Eckhardt who I shared a conversation with in the foyer only to discover that he was playing a show later that week with a pianist called Jack Perla, who’s name and playing I knew from my collaborative musical partner from back home in Wolverhampton called Surinder Sandhu, who had recently worked with Jack. This cool encounter with Kai led me to the show and a meeting with Jack, and later being invited to Kai’s studio, where I met thunderous drummer ‘Alan Hertz’ and Keyboard player and composer Paul Godwin, who had an electronic outfit called DOGON.

“Because of their preoccupations with the doubleness of things, the Dogon have two signs for each of the four elements. –Sir Francis Huxley, The Way Of The Sacred. pg. 94.

I was familiar with the name Dogon from reading Cosmic Trigger and this mini little synchronicity burnt into my memory right there. I was invited back to Kai’s studio shortly afterwards to perform with Paul Godwin, Rhiannon and Kai in his ‘Modern Fairy Tale’ spoken word musical opera, and thereafter to perform in many other settings with the great Kai Eckhardt, leading to me playing over fifty shows with Garaj Mahal and recording on their first two studio albums: Mondo Garaj and Blueberry Cave.

In an email correspondence with Mark Pesce last week I mentioned ‘Dogon’ and Paul Godwin, who Mark had also collaborated with on a music related project, in the context of remembering the Planetworkers Conference, where Mark gave a speech titled “The Real World”.


Dogon Nommo Hemphill and Roach.

The above sketches out some of the thoughts I was having yesterday while reading Francis Huxley on the Dogon, sitting in Oosterpark, minutes after a remarkable conversation and musical performance that somewhat helped me tune in the West African ‘Dogon’ tribe in Huxley’s book that has led to my current state of excitement in revisiting the ‘Dogon’ tales in 2010, using both ‘Finnegans Wake’ and the music and art performance of Sun Ra and his Arkestra, as contextual ‘spaces’ and ‘times’ for this new analysis, and a basis for my own interpretations of the data.

Comet Kahoutek

A somewhat related theme to the ‘Dogon Mystery’ by way of Cosmic Trigger is the fly by of the comet Kahoutek in 1973 that ties into both the ‘Starseed transmissions’ transmitted by Dr. Timothy Leary from Folsom Prison and with Sun Ra who performed a special concert for the Comet on December 12, 1973. ‘Concert for the Comet Kahoutek’ was the first Sun Ra disk I bought in approx. 1998, in part due to the ‘Starseed’ connection to the Comet.


Kosmic Trigger.

“Have real honest to god extraterrestrials from Sirius been meddling in the affairs of this backward planet? – Robert Anton Wislon, CT, pg, 184.

I should emphasize the impact this book had on me twelve years ago, in my attempt here to record my state of mind and reason back then, when building ‘fly agaric 23’ and navigating my way through the works of RAW and Terence Mckenna, continuing my experimental, Jazz inflected musical journey as a Drummer and DJ, intent on including and sharing some of the wisdom I perceived within these works; the drive that led me to journey to the US and study with Dr. Wilson.

Like Robert Anton Wilson, the Dogon tribe of West Africa demonstrate an interest in the Sirius double/triple? star system. “Sirius is important to you” and “something about time, the future and infinity” are words that Dr. Wilson saw written on a Black Board by a man with a long white beard, like Mr. Natural (or Dr. John Dee) in an important vision/dream he wrestled into his waking life and book, due in part to the fact that he had this dream/vision on July 23rd 1973. Sirius, the Dogon tribe and the 23 enigma collide or give birth at this point in RAW’s life, experimenting with Astral Projection, Magick and psychedelics and experiencing contact, success and breakthroughs in these areas of Occult research and shared feedback.

Finnegans Nommo

Through the cycle of Osiris, Isis plays a number of important roles; she is mother, faithful wife, sister-lover, steadfast widow. The goddess had thousands of names, and many shapes; she might be a divine cow, a bird, or even the star Sothis (Sirius). Her manifest nature is shown at one point in FW as several of these forms, and the search for the parts of Osiris is suggested simultaneously, as a questing crone runs to "sothisfeige her cowrieosity" (14.02). --Mark L. Troy. --http://www.trentu.ca/faculty/jjoyce/mummeries/troybook.htm

So what are the Dogon Tribe all about and why are they so important to us today, what can we learn from the wisdom they have shared, how does it relate to our present situation on earth? These more objective questions are best tackled by invoking my favourite book and mighty not-so-secret secret weapon in the war on some drugs: Finnegans Wake.

It seems that much of the great learning and wisdom gathered by the Dogon can be best distinguished by its relationship to modern ideas, scientific findings, cosmological models, BIG uestions about a singularity, self and becoming, causality, prophecy, the future of humanity and planet earth, the cosmos, spacetime and beyond.

While reading Sir Francis Huxley describe the intricacies and complex ideas of the Dogon I thought of the ‘resolution of opposites’ at work in Finnegans Wake, and in a flash saw every piece of symbolism Huxley mentioned in Joyce’s masterpiece, as if it were itself a tale of the Nommo tribe, or some extraterrestrial multilingual intelligence guiding us into the future of hypertext and hyperculture. Lo.


Sun Ra and Sirius

It seems likely to me that amidst Sun Ra’s extensive literary study into African and world folklore and mythology he came across the practices and traditions of the Dogon tribe. And I imagine would have latched onto some of the themes of possible extraterrestrial contact, but more importantly forwarded, retranslated and represented the music, dance, art and culture of these tribes, Sun Ra performed and recorded music. Something that unfortunately most other extraterrestrial theorists overlook as a means of communication with ‘higher’ beings, if you like to use the ‘higher’ label.

Make it Knu!

The most economical explanation for all of this seems to be that an Earth-Sirius communication has occurred, at least once, probably several times. –RAW. CT, 1pg. 89.

That ‘they’ or ‘it’ travel by way of music seems a given to me personally, if you like to adopt a pretty simple model for extraterrestrial intelligence and communication. Yet, we must agree that any advanced form of communication would work throughout all of our recognized mediums and our spectrum of energy waves. But music, music seems like an ancient and relatively simple mode of two-way communication with ‘it’. Maybe it’s better to call ‘it’ hyper-intelligence’ and maybe at this stage propose that ‘it’ maybe ubiquitous throughout spacetime.

The music and ‘it’ tend to reveal each other on occasion, I think, and something about some music in the Jazz idiom seems to somehow scramble time & space in a way reminiscent of ‘hyperintelligence’ a glimpse into the fututure-presnet-pist side, where everything changes in an instant, and new worlds open up and with them new possibilities, new conversations, new languages and new ideas. Make it Knu!

ET Net

Mark Pesce recently exposed the genius of James Joyce and in particular his book Finnegans Wake, and illustrates how Joyce co-opted the future in some sense, co-inventing ‘hypertext’ before programmable computers and co-ordinating some as yet unknown and undefined ‘Hyperintelligence’ into his book, that has managed to withstand the void of literature created by html Hypertext, internet and twitter. I have collaborated on further illustrating his writing.

To my knowledge Joyce did not report any extraterrestrial experiences in the explicit sense that both RAW and Sun Ra did, 'RA' claiming his first encounter in 1936 went as follows:

… my whole body changed into something else. I could see through myself. And I went up … I wasn't in human form … I landed on a planet that I identified as Saturn … they teleported me and I was down on [a] stage with them. They wanted to talk with me. They had one little antenna on each ear. A little antenna over each eye. They talked to me. They told me to stop [attending college] because there was going to be great trouble in schools … the world was going into complete chaos … I would speak [through music], and the world would listen. That's what they told me. --Szwed, John F. (August 21, 1998). Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra.

However, anybody who claims that Joyce did not have an Extraterrestrial experience seems to have missed the point of Finnegans Wake, that for me qualifies as a totally ‘alien’ and certifiably advanced language and/or code. Precisely the kind of thing an advanced civilization would want to communicate to earthly humanity: the wonder and epiphany at the interconnectedness of all things.

For me James Joyce’s FW and the music of Sun Ra and his Arkestra are similar shaped vehicles of extraterrestrial communication, but whereas the music of Sun Ra is explicit and enters through the eye and ear world, Joyce reverses the process somewhat, ringing and jangling songs and tunes, spells and proverbs from dozens of languages, all sensed in the head-space, but with a strange sense of timelessness and transcendence of space, when ‘non-simultaneously apprehended’ with the human eye; jumping about a jungle of earthly hyperintelligence and hilaritas, condensed into nodal clusters of meaning and hyper-connectivity, ringing many bells and scattering connections allwayswords.

SUN RAW

“I might mention that Arthur Young, founder of the Institute for the study of consciousness, was the one who originally turned Robert Temple on to the idea of trying to find out how the Dogon tribe knew so much about the dark companion of Sirius. And Arthur Young, in turn, had first heard of this tribal lore from Harry Smith, a film maker who claims to be the son of Aleister Crowley...) –Saul Paul Sirag, CT, pg. 242.

I am not sure if RAW listened to Sun Ra, but it stand a good chance due to telling me he liked Charlie Parker, Mahler, Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Beethoven and Miles Davis, in particular. And Robert first got turned onto the debil’ weed at a Modern Jazz Quintet show, so RAW was certainly Hip to Bebop and jazz, and with his perchance for ‘Classical’ music too one would imagine Big Band Jazz and the sounds of Sun Ra might tickle his fancy.

Who knows, but I want to show here how the music of Sun Ra links directly into RAWs chapter in Cosmic Trigger detailing Dr. Timothy Leary’s experience with extraterrestrial intelligence and the comet Kahoutek earyh flyby in 1973, an event I chose to magnify here as it had a significant ‘woo woo’ effect on me when I first read Cosmic Trigger and encountered the Sirius Mystery. Nonetheless I like to think that RAW might enjoy a SUN RAW comparative essay with a healthy dose of Finnegans Wake stirred in.

For more on this please see my essay 'The Myth Art and Music of Sun Ra' (Headpress, 2010)

Back To Earth Frontear.

“The Dogon believe that everyone is born with eight seeds stored within the collarbones, four coming from the mother’s line and four from the father’s—a prototype, in symbolic terms of modern genetic theory. --Sir Francis Huxley, The Way Of The Sacred, Pg. 166.

Although the ‘outer space’ theme may often be criticised as leaving planet earth and humanity behind in an escapist trip to the stars, yet on the contrary I will show how the outer space theme in the works of Sun Ra, RAW and James Joyce, or the ‘cosmological’ complexity and ‘chaos’ often inherent in their works transmits a message for earth people, right here right now, that this ‘it’ or ‘hyperintelligence’ exists everywhere and nowhere, invisible and staring us straight in the face, neither here nor there but with us. No we are not alone in the Universe, on any level, we are hyperconnected throughout time and space, on many levels, if we wish to tune into them. Tune in, remember, and find the other worlds?

Solstice 2010

"by the tremours of Thundery and Ulerin's dogstar, you alone, windblasted tree of the knowledge of beautiful andevil, ay, clothed upon with the metuor and shimmering like the horescens, astroglodynamonologos, --FW, 194.

Looking back at my experience this Solstice I deduce that the Sun, and the sun behind the sun has gently hinted that ‘Sirius IS impotant” and that the African wisdom found in the Dogon tribe can be teased out from Finnegans Wake and the study of Joyce’s special cosmological ‘tribal’ language.


A New Dogon tale?

I have found that during my research into these three iconoclast multicultural icons the pull to create a new interpretation of current events and the state of the planet earth in 2010. Using my sense for connectivity and mixing media I present the SUN RA SIRIUS SEED TRANSMISSION sampler, enjoy, love, steve.

"An whele time he was rancing there smutsy floskons nodunder ycholerd for their poopishers, ahull onem Fyre maynoother endnow! Shatten up ship ! Bouououmce ! Nomo clandoilskins cheakinlevers ! --James Joyce, FW, 370.

“Circling round Shaun the girls weep, their mourning song echoes, "dosiriously it psalmodied" (470.13). The girls are sadly desirous of Osiris, desirous as Sirius (Sothis). It was in the form of this star that Isis wept for the lost Osiris. The sight of the rising Dog-Star has always coincided with the overflow of the Nile waters, thus it was considered that the tears of the goddess, weeping for her brother-husband, caused the inundation which fertilized the land of Egypt (DRT, p. 22). This idea is expanded at 254.16, "A and aa ab ad a bu abiad. A babbel men dub gulch of tears." In this watery babbling runs the Nile, which flows (after leaving the Nyanzas and Jebel) as the Abiad or White Nile, until it reaches Abu, the area of the first cataract, at which point the Nile Valley begins ("Nile", EB, XIX, 695). Thus, a naturalistic explanation is given for the babbling waters flowing down into the valley, which the ancients saw as a vale or gulch of tears. --Mark L. Troy. Mummeries of Resurrection

Some sources and resources:

SUN RA: Essays And Interviews - Edited by John Sinclair
Cosmic Trigger - Robert Anton Wilson
Finnegans Wake - James Joyce
The Way Of The Sacred - Sir Francis Huxley
Mummeries of Resurrection - Mark L. Troy
Wikiedia

http://hyperreal.org/~mpesce/
http://www.vurigetongen.nl/page2/page2.html
http://www.fotuva.org/music/discog.html
http://www.amsterdamroots.nl/index.php?id=517
http://mkzdk.org/francis/index.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_B#Sirius_B
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sothis


--Steven James Pratt.
First draught June 21st 2010, Amsterdam, 6.30 A.M