Sunday, July 5, 2020


DO IT WITH LAUGHTER,  AND DO IT WITH TEARS



You got what they call the immortal spirit
You can feel it all night, you can feel it in the morn'
It creeps in your body the day you were born
One strike of lightning is all that I need
And a blast of ‘lectricity that runs at top speed
Shimmy your ribs, I'll stick in the knife
Gonna jump-start my creation to life
I want to bring someone to life, turn back the years
Do it with laughter, and do it with tears…

My Own Version of You - Bob Dylan



‘The Seer’, a short book by Lars Muhl about his spiritual teacher, a Danish clairvoyant and healer who took the name ‘Calle de Montségur’ and spent most of his later life in southwestern France, abounds in visionary and symbolic experiences, initiations, and musings about the Cathars and the Holy Grail. Reminiscent in some respects of the writings of Gurdjieff and Hermann Hesse, it is engaging and interesting, although the credibility of its details may be moot. Muhl became the Seer’s apprentice after being cured by Calle of a longstanding mysterious illness, and he spent a few years being taught by him. He also developed a deep interest in the healing practices of the Essenes, ancient religious communities in Israel about whom much is speculated but little is definitively known. According to Muhl the Essenes were healers, prophets, astronomers, astrologers, and vegetarians, their beliefs informed by Zoroastrianism, Chaldean religion, Egyptian mystery schools, and possibly by Buddhism. There seems to have been a close connection with teachings that are now known as Gnosticism. Muhl is of the opinion that the scrolls which were found in the 1940s in caves near the Dead Sea are Essene and, more debatably, that those from Nag Hammadi come from the same source. He suggests that Jesus, whom he refers to as Yeshua, the Aramaic form of the name, was initiated in the Essene tradition, from which his teachings were derived.

After reading ‘The Seer’ I turned to ‘The Nag Hammadi Library in English’, which contains translations of Coptic Gnostic texts.  According to James Robinson’s introduction, the focus that brought the collection together ‘is an estrangement from the mass of humanity, an affinity to an ideal order that completely transcends life as we know it, and a life-style radically other than common practice. This life-style involved giving up all the goods that people usually desire and longing for an ultimate liberation’.  The texts in the library, he writes, have much in common ‘with primitive Christianity, with eastern religion, and with ‘holy men’ (and women) of all times, as well as with the more secular equivalents of today, such as the counter-culture movements coming from the 1960s’.

Gnosticism, a loose grouping of ancient religious ideas and system that originated in the first century CE among Jewish and early Christian groups and sects, proposes that humans are divine souls trapped in a material world that was made by an imperfect god or deity. Considering the material world as flawed and evil, Gnostics held that the task of humanity, based on the example of Jesus, was to turn away from darkness and to return to light, usually through mystical or esoteric insight. Close to Gnosticism’s dualistic cosmology is Manichaeism, a religion founded in the third century CE in Persia by the prophet Mani, which spread rapidly through the middle east and further afield; in Catharism,  the movement’s final form, it survived in southern France until the Middle Ages, when it was eventually subdued by crusaders. The ruins of the castle at Montségur, the town where Lars Muhl spent several years with the Seer, are the remains of a Cathar stronghold.

Many writers and thinkers have been influenced by Gnostic ideas; among  the more recent are the Theosophist Mme. Blavatsky, the psychoanalyst C.G. Jung, the poets W.B.Yeats and Allen Ginsberg, and the novelists Hermann Hesse, Jack Kerouac, and Lawrence Durrell. Perhaps the most important was the poet and artist William Blake, whose dualistic cosmology was central to almost everything he did. Blake considered ‘salvation’ to be the full expression of his visionary spirit; a few months before he died he told a friend that he was ‘very near the gates of death’ but ‘not in spirit and life, not in the real man, the imagination, which liveth for ever. In that I am stronger and stronger, as this foolish body decays’.

It may not be coincidental that during the isolation of ‘lockdown’ I’ve spent some time with William Blake’s work, and especially with his illuminated books, whose astonishing intensity can be a distraction in these difficult times. I understand little of his symbolism, but it barely matters, as the depth and richness of his inner world is nourishing enough. I’ve also been listening to Bob Dylan’s new album, Rough and Rowdy Ways, and I began to suspect that there might be something Gnostic about his lyrics too,  because the subject was on my mind and I was aware that he has been influenced by Blake, whom he mentions in the first song on the record. Some internet research swiftly revealed that there are at least two books written on the subject - there is little about Bob Dylan that has not already been thought or said - but it is still worth remarking that Rough and Rowdy Ways,  a collection of songs about death, temporality, and battles between good and evil, might plausibly be described as Manichaean.

One of the most intriguing chapters in The Old, Weird America,  Greil Marcus’ rambling and speculative book on Bob Dylan’s seminal  The Basement Tapes,  reflects on Harry Smith’s classic Anthology of American Folk Music, which was first released in 1952 and became immensely important to Dylan and many of his contemporaries in the early 1960s. Marcus describes Smith as ‘a polymath and an autodidact, a dope fiend and an alcoholic, a legendary experimental filmmaker and a more legendary sponger'.  A notorious fabulist and story-teller, he was a friend of Allen Ginsberg and  became closely  involved with the 1960s counterculture. Smith had been familiar with esoteric religion since childhood; his parents were Theosophists, and his great-grandfather seems to have been involved in the ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’, a Neo-Gnostic sect (once connected with the occultist Aleister Crowley) that combined elements of different religions with Masonic and magic symbolism. Although the anthology was composed of unfamiliar hillbilly songs and primitive blues, which accounted for its extraordinary influence, it is not insignificant that Smith chose to present it in a way that reflected his interest in alchemy, and particularly in the physician, astrologer, and cosmologist Robert Fludd. Each of the original three two-record sets had the same cover art, an etching of an instrument that Smith, following the thinking of Fludd, called a ‘Celestial Monochord’, and their colour backgrounds corresponded to three classical alchemical elements of water, fire, and air. A fourth volume, released many years later, had a yellow cover that represented earth. Smith was consecrated a bishop in the ‘Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica’, which includes William Blake among its ‘saints’, and after his death a branch of ‘Ordo Templi Orientis’, of which he had long been a member, performed a Gnostic mass for him at St.Mark’s Church in New York’s East Village.

Some references:

Lars Muhl: 'Gateways and Passwords to Heaven'

Jesus and the Essenes: An Esoteric History

Bob Dylan: 'My Own Version of You'

Harry Smith Anthology



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Monday, June 22, 2020



'THE HOPKINS MANUSCRIPT', TRICKSTERISM,  AND BRAZILIAN FOOTBALL



One of the more enjoyable and apocalyptic books I read during ‘lockdown’ was The Hopkins Manuscript, written by R.C.Sheriff in 1939, which tells the story of Edgar Hopkins, a retired and solitary schoolteacher who lives in Hampshire and breeds prize poultry, and how he deals with the prospect of the moon’s imminent collision with the earth. The first chapters, which are very funny, describe Hopkins’ small-minded snobbery and self-importance as he prepares for the end of the world, but the second part of the book is more sober. To his surprise, Hopkins survives what he calls the ‘cataclysm’ and begins to put together a strategy for a new way of life. Gradually he develops empathy and affection for his fellow human beings, and by the end of the book the reader has developed an unexpected  degree of sympathy for a man who was ‘almost tempted to tell John Briggs, the carpenter, that his first name was Edgar’.

I also watched an online interview with Bayo Akomolafe, an unconventional academic, lecturer, and speaker who was born in Nigeria and now lives in India with his wife and child. Especially concerned with ideas about social, cultural, and environmental crises, Akomolafe trained as a clinical psychologist and subsequently spent time with traditional Yoruba healers in West Africa, after which his life changed focus and direction. Choosing to devote himself to the exploration of a ‘magical’ world that doesn’t fit normal Western cultural paradigms, he leads an organisation called ‘The Emergence Network’, described on its website as a ‘trickster activist artist collective’.

Struck by one of his favourite phrases, ‘the times are urgent, let us slow down’ (apparently derived from a Yoruba saying) I read some of Akomolafe’s essays, in which he enjoys inverting the obvious, making unexpected associations, and challenging linear thinking. ‘In order to find our way we must become lost’, he writes, going on to suggest that it may be misguided to search for rational solutions when faced with radical social and environmental crises. He proposes instead a willingness to live in a liminal or ‘in-between’ state of mind in order that new solutions might come into consciousness. Some of his ideas are more focussed;  reflecting on the growing number of tourists travelling to countries like Peru, Colombia, and India in order to participate in ayahuasca ceremonies or meditation retreats, he remarks that this kind of escapism wrongly assumes that indigenous peoples are more connected to ‘authentic’ ways of living. Rather, he says, we should develop our own authenticity and inner nature by committing ourselves to finding the spiritual in the everyday. Real spirituality, he adds, can be found in unexpected ways and places: in failure, brokenness, and in ‘sanctuaries of the otherwise’, which are spaces for falling apart, shapeshifting, resting, and embodying new forms.

Akomolafe’s essays, frequently articulated in the language of clinical psychology and critical theory, also borrow from his experience of Yoruba culture and make much of the idea of the ‘trickster’, the archetypal transgressor and rule-breaker. ‘Tricksterism’ is a term that is widely and often loosely used, and as Lewis Hyde reminds us in Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art, a comprehensive account of the subject, ‘most of the travellers, liars, thieves, and shameless personalities of the twentieth century’ are not tricksters. ‘Their disruptions are not subtle enough, or pitched at a high enough level’, he writes. ‘Trickster isn’t a run-of-the-mill liar and thief. When he lies and steals, it isn’t so much to get away with something or get rich as to disturb the established categories of truth and property and, by so doing, open the road to possible new worlds’.

Vestiges of true ‘tricksterism’ were nonetheless evident in the Brazil of my childhood, where popular culture was infused with influences from West Africa that had been brought over by slaves. The most obvious manifestations of Brazilian ‘tricksterism’ were the ‘jeitinho’ and ‘malandragem’, cunning ways of gaining personal advantage in challenging situations. The ‘jeitinho’ was seldom overtly transgressive, although it always involved subtlety and manipulation, but ‘malandragem’ often used illicit or illegal means and strategies, frequently justified by the belief that work and honesty were incapable of getting the ‘malandro’, who was usually poor and underprivileged, what he wanted and deserved. Despite his blatant selfishness there was seldom any intent to cause obvious harm to anyone else.

The skills and imagination of the ‘malandro’ were greatly admired, perhaps especially in football. Garrincha, for instance, the bow-legged ‘bad boy’ of ‘futebol’ and one of the most beloved of Brazilian players, used to take pleasure in dribbling around defenders and then backtracking so he could do it again. His womanising, drinking, and lack of self-discipline were legendary, but these qualities took nothing away from his popularity. On the contrary, he became known as the ‘alegria do povo’ (’the joy of the people’) and ‘anjo de pernas tortas’ (‘angel with crooked legs’). Some of Garrincha’s talents and characteristics are still evident in contemporary Brazilian players, but  even at home they are now less than wholeheartedly admired, and in Europe, where the most successful ply their trade, the more flamboyant Brazilian footballers are often considered something of a liability. Many of their tricks are seen as ‘showboating’ or humiliation of the opponent, and any lack of professionalism is barely tolerated.

Nonetheless, the period of Brazilian football that is thought of as its ‘Golden Age’(1958-1970) was infused with the spirit of ‘malandragem’. The Brazilian footballer’s style, the sociologist Gilberto Freyre once explained, was typically opposed to European Apollonian order,  full of ‘irrational surprises and Dionysian variations’  and a reflection of ‘mulatismo’, the mix of black and white races. In the 1930s, Brazilian football and ‘samba’ became hugely popular in the cities of Rio and São Paulo, where industrialisation attracted workers from the ‘interior’, many of them descended from former slaves. Football, at first the preserve of well-to-do white people, gradually assimilated black players, who often used steps and moves influenced by ‘samba’ dancing and the martial art of ‘capoeira’, both rooted in African culture, as part of their technique. Feints, tricks, and bending of the rules became part of their game. It is said that referees would often overlook fouls by white players on blacks, but never the other way round, so black players had to develop the skills of avoiding obvious contact with white opponents and of not being caught if they did. ‘Malandragem’ in football was a combination of survivalism, skill, and gamesmanship.



Some references:




 
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