part one, part two 

Hammond writes in his diary, “Whenever I ask George how the Blacktail Circle was formed, he only says, ‘Cerberus just three crazy dogs tied together with a rope.  Keep ‘em in line.’”  These “crazy dogs” have perhaps more in common than might appear at first.  The life of each—at least up to the forming of the Blacktail Circle—conforms to a similar pattern:  an talented person is put through an extraordinary ordeal, and comes out a single-minded, ascetic “mental voyager” (as Hammond often refers to members of the circle).  But if mental voyagers they be, George Lewis was the most daring at every stage.  Hammond hypothesizes that the reason Lewis never achieved the popular success he deserved was that “he just didn’t give a damn about this world.”

George Lewis’s life can be divided into roughly four stages.  The first was a moody childhood and adolescence, full of wildly uncontrolled energy which could only extinguish itself in a singular mystical revelation at the age of 16.  The second stage was a subdued ascetic existence whose only purpose was to find spiritual expression through music.  This stage ended, and the third began, at the age of 25 when he encountered Flavia.  The deeper nature of this shift is quite mysterious, but there are three obvious components to it:  (i) the addition of auditory hallucinations to his schizophrenic symptoms, (ii) the achievement of popular success, and (iii) a sudden interest in books.  (Only the last has an obvious explanation.)  The fourth and final stage was his descent into complete psychosis.  The onset of this stage, however, was not as sudden, though it was punctuated by his only known written work, Cosmogonic Cricket and his final, most radical album, “Dance!”

Lewis, growing up in a small black community in Mississippi, displayed a very early predisposition for religious ecstasies, from speaking in tongues during congregation to demonic possession at wholly unpredictable times.  Very early on his family recognized that the boy was a channel for spirits of all kinds—whether from heaven or hell.  The local priest performed at least a dozen exorcisms on the child.  But none of this seemed to phase Lewis, who found a social niche among rabble-rousers and outcasts.  These so-called friends found him immensely entertaining because he almost never turned down a dare.  By the age of thirteen Lewis had had sexual intercourse with a goat, gotten pass-out drunk, electrocuted himself climbing a power-line pole, broken three bones attempting to ride on the hood of a passing car, and been shot with a shotgun at long range while trespassing.  The only thing Lewis had any fear of were girls, from whom he got nothing but ridicule for his advances.  At even the most liberal social gatherings he would quickly get out of control and get himself thrown out.  Verbal outbursts and insults were his most common offenses.  Perhaps oddly, he never picked fights.  But he was quite often challenged, almost never backed down, and was invariably beaten.  Fortunately, Lewis had always had an amazing constitution, both physical and mental, and at no point appeared to lose his courage or bearing.

The best way to get Lewis under control, people found, was to throw him an instrument.  Even as a six-year-old, Lewis’s sense of rhythm was flawless.  In fact, it was too good, and year-by-year Lewis’s skills improved to the point where he could reputedly “make a Saturday picnic into a spiritual revival, or a funeral gathering into a debauched revelry” (Christiansen, The Oddball Life of George Lewis, 1985, p. 4).  But Lewis’s music, however energetic and liberating, was not considered skillful or even quite moving.  The local pastor was said to have called it “wild, rebellious, and empty.”

In his early teens, Lewis became less and less welcome at most social gatherings, and spent more and more time drinking with his delinquent friends or—often enough—by himself.  By the age of fifteen he was a complete alcoholic, and on his sixteenth birthday his parents kicked him out of the house. 
 
*

Thus ends the first stage of Lewis’s life.  What happens next is reported in Hammond’s diary, during a discussion of Lewis’s Cosmogonic Cricket:

The other day asked Flavia how it got its name, and she said it was another result Lewis’s “neologicizin’.”  After he penned the work Hamachandra sat him down and the two of them tried to figure out what to call it.  The working title had been George’s “Philosophy Noise.”  Hamachandra thought he caught George’s meaning, suggested “Cosmogonic Racket” instead because he thought it was critique not of all philosophy up until now, but more precisely all cosmogony, and because “racket” was George’s favored term in the manuscript, was more catchy, more Lewisian, etc.  George, however, just could not hear it through H.’s Indian accent, asking repeatedly, “Cosmonaut Cricket?”  After much repetition he finally got, “Cosmogonic Cricket,” now George extremely excited, getting meaning of cosmogony and seeing connection with his cricket meditation.  At this point H. didn’t [feel] inclined to correct any further, since the cricket meditation is indeed central, more so than the idea of racket.  Today, being curious about this cricket, asked George if based on real story and he said it was, in fact based on mystical experience at age of 16.  He had been kicked out of the house for being a drunk, and one day came too found himself half-starving in stifling humid 100 degree afternoon weather in the forest, lying there on the forest floor.  Said he experienced absolute nothing, about to disappear in his existence entirely when a single cricket sounded about 15 feet from his head.  George lying there, hearing the cricket and hungover as “a daisy in the mud” suddenly this cricket was fully understood and felt in his entirety as real being to George.  Realizes only the past [is] real, that death is the ultimate unreality and birth the ultimate existence.  Absorbs this cricket, and through it a soul enters his body which was previously soulless.  To this day George does not believe his body inhabited by any soul (except demons) prior to his 16th birthday.  At this point George stops drinking for good and works odd jobs, discovers an insatiable longing for rhythm and music, and plays whenever [he] gets [a] chance.  Now his music infused with spirit, a new rainbow of moods and people start realizing he’s really good and his career develops.  George says, “They say I sold my soul to the devil to play so good.  Bullshi[t].  I bought my soul from the devil.  It’s all mine now, not his.”  I ask him what he traded for it.  “My mind, fool!  Devil got so many souls he’s sellin’ ‘em cheap!”

The second stage of Lewis’s life was a spent as a wanderer.  He wasn’t so much a musician waiting for a break as a guy who played so well he left others in suspense for his break.  Anyone who knew him during this period could confirm that Lewis didn’t care (Christianson, p. 25).  He just kept playing, and soon all the hippest venues would pay him good money to visit. 

But Lewis was certainly never “forward-thinking,” not in the right way to win him easy fame.  While contemporaries were busy pioneering the use of the electric guitar and taking inspiration from rock and roll and jazz, Lewis kept returning to his old acoustic guitar, and the simple rhythms of old style blues.  To whatever extent popular music would complexify, that’s the extent to which Lewis’s style would simplify.

It would be a mistake, however, to say that Lewis was not innovative.  Despite the fact that he used primarily the acoustic guitar and his own voice, hardly anyone in the know would have classified him as a “country blues” musician.  His style was too modern.  As Hammond puts it, “It was stripped-down, like country blues, it was personal, spiritual, and earthy, like country blues.  But it wasn’t country blues.  It is hard to say what it was.  It seemed to open out into eternity, and no talented rock or blues musician could listen to him play live without thinking ‘Damn!  How do I get my music to do that!’  You didn’t want to literally imitate him, but somehow he was able to convey what was aesthetically possible in music.”

Also a testament to Lewis’s creativity was the fact that he improvised the vast majority of his performances and songs.  This, of course, constituted a further barrier to popular success.  No one covered his songs because he had no songs to cover, at least not until his first album, released in 1959, called “Trail of Blues.”  The record company had practically begged him to record it, and, none to excited about it, Lewis acquiesced.  The result was a lukewarm, if unique, recording.  It sold around 140 copies.  Less than two years later, just before meeting Flavia, he recorded “Beneath the Sun,” which sold a bit better, but still only to the blues elite. 

*

Now let’s fast forward.  Though Flavia and Lewis grew closer in the years after Hamachandra’s abandonment, their relationship also grew more fiery.  The more philosophy Lewis read, the more he became convinced, as Hamachandra already had, that Flavia’s views were profoundly mistaken.  But while Hamachandra’s opinion was based on a holistic logical judgment on her theoretical framework, Lewis’s opinion was based on a growing personal antagonism against Western thought in general.  Refusing to back down, Lewis only continued to read the more so he could carry on the debate, a debate that grew more and more intense leading up to Lewis’s “second epiphany” received during Christmas of 1965.  Lewis had started conversing with what he called a “specter,” a being inhabiting some sort of parallel dimension, though in Lewis’s terms it “lived in the pure motions and forces between objects, neither ghost nor beast nor demon nor angel.”  They had prepared a sort of Christmas Eve dinner for the children, now four and two, and were just sitting down when Lewis stood up, quietly saying, “the spirit …” and left the house to go wandering while he began composing a treatise in his head.  Christmas morning he returned, nearly frostbitten, and began dictating the whole thing to his wife, entitled Philosophy Noise, and soon to be known as Cosmogonic Cricket.

*

In the meantime, Flavia had taken some of Lewis and Hamachandra’s criticisms to heart, and after rereading Kierkegaard’s Either/Or (this time all the way through) she herself came to believe there was some kind of anomaly in her thinking.  After studying George’s complex and puzzling treatise in depth for several weeks in the January of 1966, she came to believe that he had found, not a solution, but a “way out” as she described it, she mailed a copy to Hamachandra with a cover note “please read in its entirety before you decide.”

*

Hamachandra would do so in one sitting, and was back in D.C. within a week, to the pleasant astonishment of Flavia.  He immediately began working with George on the stylistic problems in the manuscript, including, famously, the title.  By that summer the three of them were an intellectual unit, and even had come up with a name for themselves:  “The Triad.”  Surely this name had some sort of symbolic significance to them, but exactly what we have no records to suggest.  That fall, they began to look for a publisher, but as I’ve said, this was to bear little fruit, except to win them an important new follower who went by “Franky.”  Also that fall, they began to make plans for one of the most infamous art heists of the 20th century.

On the subject of what we should learn from artists, Mr Nietszche said:
“How can we make things beautiful, attractive, and desirable for us when they are not?” Artists look through all sorts of lenses, lights, distances, and distortions to bring this off, but they stop where art ends. Mr Nietszche protested: “But we want to be poets of our life…”

And so I said to comfort the witch, “Don’t stoop and wag your finger like some angry old hag! There are cracks in the roof and mice in the walls. Your anus leaks and everyone mutters garbage to themselves under their breath. The air stinks if you don’t wrinkle your nose.”

Mr Nietzsche said, “I shall be one of those who make things beautiful.  Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly.  I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation.  And all in all and on the whole:  some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.”

And so I said to comfort the witch, “You’re no witch. You cut up children and eat them, but they’re such easy prey. Eat all the kiddies you want, Lady, what else are you good for?  Don’t worry, they’ll always keep coming for more candy.”

Ahh, you weren’t nuthin’ but a sack of rocks.

The little old lady came to the doctor for her respiratory problems.

“What ails you, little old lady?”

“Wheelll. I just can’t seem. To catch my breath.”

“Hm. Hm. I’ve seen your kind before. Some rest is all you need, and a laxative. Take these pills when you wake up and these pills when you sleep.” He handed her two bottles and ushered her out, patting her kindly on her stooped back.

The little old lady hobbled to the door, then the sidewalk, then the street. Sadly, she was too slow for traffic. The driver never even saw her.

Scene: Cheesily done ruins smoking in the desert.  Stormtroopers stand over dead villagers.  The one closest to us starts talking.

STORMTROOPER 1:  Weehr hfo Fhuhck– [impatiently takes off his helmet, gestures sadly at the carnage] – We’re so fucking evil.  I quit. [Throws his helmet on the ground and starts walking away.]

Stormtrooper 2 pivots stiffly toward him, “Pyoot!” and he falls dead.  Stormtrooper 2 continues on his way.

part one, part three 

Hamachandra grew up in a small poverty-stricken village in India.  His subsequent destiny was put in motion by two life-shattering events:  a deadly illness, and a mistaken mail-delivery.  Near Hamachandra’s home village was an affluent British colony of a similar name, and mail was often misdirected to one or the other.  What Hamachandra’s family received, one day, was about 40 books from a man’s library, being delivered all the way from war-ravaged England (the year was 1944).  Overjoyed to receive such an abundant supply of kindling, bed straw, and toilet paper, they put it to use immediately.  Hamachandra, a naturally curious 8-year-old boy, found these pages of printed symbols intriguing at first, but was very soon back outside playing with the other village children.  Only weeks later he fell terribly ill with an allegedly deadly disease (what disease this was is not known since Nogen’s remarks on the subject are vague) that left him bed-ridden for more than a month.  With nothing else to do, he spent his time gazing at the pages of the surviving books.  During his feverish delirium, he began seeing inexpressible patterns among the symbols on these pages (he was neither schooled in English nor in reading) and claims that he spent many long nights having nightmares concerning them.  His parents, wondering if the books were doing him harm, took them away.  However, at this point his condition worsened drastically, and they quickly returned them, at which point he started getting better. 

The day his fever broke, Hamachandra claims to have had an incredible epiphany, upon which he not only new how to read English and modern mathematical notation, but understood in depth the contents of several of the books, in particular Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, several textbooks of theoretical physics and Greek mythology, as well as an English translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the sizable fragment that was left of Marx’s Capital, and a bit of Freudian psychology.  His parents were convinced he had gone utterly mad, and promptly burnt all the books.

(Whether this account is entirely accurate is, of course, subject to doubt, but the British psychologist who examined him six years later confirmed that he had memorized many passage from these works and had an impressive knowledge of their contents.)

Following this experience, Hamachandra became more and more reclusive, and began suffering more and more intense migraines.  Without anything on which to read or write, he began thinking in earnest about both Hegelian philosophy and the foundations of physics.  To him there seemed to be some kind of deep unseen connection between the two, and he spent many a sleepless night in intensely concentrated contemplation.

At the age of 14, feeling an outcast and a freak of nature, Hamachandra fled home in search of the man whose books he had absorbed those six years ago.  Arriving at the nearby British colony, he shocked a certain bookshop keeper, Thomas Warren, when, seizing a pen right out of his hand, he began scribbling furiously in tensor notation right on the surface of his desk.  Even more surprising, the boy didn’t know a word of English.   He quickly became the town wonder.  They assigned him a schoolteacher, a nurse, and an interested psychologist (Robert Nogen) who examined him daily and took copious notes (see Nogen, 1968, p. 58-69, for a summary of his findings).

Soon it was realized that Hamachandra had completely outstripped their instructional resources, and since India was descending into civil war anyway, Nogen took him to Oxford, at the age of 16, to continue his studies in physics.  The year was 1952.

*

Two years later, after earning his Ph.D. by locking himself in a room without books or writing implements and thinking about quantum fields, he published his groundbreaking article, “A Theory of Hadrons.”  Termed obscure by even the most prominent quantum physicists, Hamachandra’s theory was smashingly vindicated by subsequent developments in the theory of the residual nuclear force, and in 1958 he was offered a position at Caltech.  During the meantime, however, having emerged from his seclusion, he became infuriated at the discovery that there were Hegel scholars at Oxford, when in fact he had been assured upon arriving there that “no one studies Hegel anymore.”  During the four year period between 1954 and 1958, Hamachandra went back into seclusion were he wrestled not physics problems, but philosophical ones, suffering terribly from migraines and the raging moods that came with them.  He dared not share his philosophical ideas with anyone, so great was his fear of ridicule, and by Caltech’s invitation in 1958 he was actually relieved to find a new distraction from his inner turmoil. 

At Caltech, leaving resident giants such as Richard Feynman and Murray Gell-Mann unimpressed, Hamachandra began studying the less glorified physics of phase transitions and stars, while emitting frequent unfounded “prophesies” of the physics to come, in particular on what would become the Standard Model.  Though his predictions were surprisingly accurate, his lack of rigor destroyed his reputation as real scientist. 

In time word of his work reached Princeton, and the controversy left the faculty deeply divided for several days, before the fact that the year (1961) read the same upside-down became the new favorite topic of conversation among the symmetry-minded intellectuals there (for an account, see Wheeler’s autobiography).

Flavia, however, could not shake the thought, and was in Pasadena by that November.

*

In order to meet the recluse, Flavia had to literally camp outside his apartment and wait for him to emerge.  When he did, she was impressed by his handsomeness and genial manner, and after a couple of meetings, she was complete bowled-over by his (according to her) profound and revolutionary understanding of Hegel.  Hamachandra, for his part, instantly fell in love with the woman, who seemed to him the only person in the world that understood his mind and its travails. 

By Christmas the two were practically living together, and by February of 1962, 35-year-old Flavia realized that she was pregnant.  At first she was infuriated.  Her idea had been to give birth to a new philosophy, perhaps, but not a child.  Soon however, the idea of a biological Apollonian offspring started to grow on her, and she secretly determined to have a child by Lewis as well.

Twenty-five-year-old Hamachandra, totally ignorant of Flavia’s ongoing affair with Lewis, had secrets of his own.  Flavia had always insisted on using condoms, but Hamachandra, who was completely in love and saw child-bearing as the sole essence and goal of love, had been discretely poking holes in them.

*

Within the span of one year Flavia had chanced upon her two Prophets and conceived a child by one of them.  But the actual dawn of the Blacktail Circle was not to occur for another four years.  In 1962, Flavia officially married her Apollo, whose interests (which couldn’t be dictated by his career or intellectual surroundings) had turned to mathematical puzzles, cryptograms, and ancient languages.  Having already deciphered the English written language from scratch at the age of eight, he found himself immensely talented at such pursuits, and by 1963 had dropped his physics researches altogether.  By this time, the CIA was becoming mightily interested in his talents, and soon he was their star code-breaker.  Meanwhile, Flavia had given birth to healthy baby boy, who they named Bharadwaj (meaning “lucky bird”) in the Indian tradition.  Flavia decided that he would inherit his father’s lack of a last name.  Also, being a trained philologist herself, she easily followed Hamachandra into the fields of ancient languages and cryptography, and was in fact offered a job by the CIA along with her husband, which she accepted—hiring a nanny for the child.

But in March of 1963, mere months after giving birth to her first, Flavia was pregnant with a second, by Lewis, who would spend his time between tours living with the married couple, never showing any signs of jealousy.  (Flavia made sure that it was Lewis by timing her intercourse with the two to take full advantage of her menstruation cycle.  This is never 100% effective, of course, but Flavia had unshaking faith that fate would make it work.)  Though Hamachandra was still unsuspecting, he found Lewis not only boring but irritating, and frequently questioned Flavia as to why this “vagrant” was receiving their charity.  Flavia, of course, gave highly theoretical answers to this question, alluding to a new era in Western civilization brought on by the blues aesthetic.  This would plunge Hamachandra instantly into a silently contemplative mood, though he still had the nagging feeling that some piece wasn’t fitting together right.

That August—as Flavia became “fully determined” to tell him the truth “soon”—Hamachandra, after one of his longest and most intense migraines (during which he reported that “sounds became colors and colors became explosions”), intuited it on his own in a sudden flash of clarity.  According to him, his new understanding was so profound that he almost decided to stay with Flavia for the sake of her project.  But he left, he said, because he perceived a fatal flaw in her philosophy that would spell doom for them both.  Unable to kick her out of the house (which was now in Washington D.C.), he quit his CIA job and went back to Caltech, where he continued his now blossoming research in information theory as well as ergodic and non-ergodic sequences.

Flavia’s distress and pregnancy prevented her from doing further CIA work, but she did receive ample support for herself and her baby from Lewis, who had now achieved moderate popular success with his third album, “Poor Baby Child!”  During the next few years their friendship became much closer, and the blues guitarist began reading literature—something he had never done before—including French aphorists, existentialism, and poetry from antiquity.  Flavia also gave birth to her second child, which turned out to be Lewis’s indeed.  They named it Gray George.

The time was almost ripe for the inception of the Blacktail Circle.  But first, Flavia had to overcome the “fatal flaw” in her philosophy, and Hamachandra and Lewis had to become reconciled.  Both these events would happen two years later in mid-1966.  To understand how this happened, we’ll need to take a closer look at the biography of George Lewis.

part two, part three

introduction

The small and mysterious literary society known as the “Blacktail Circle” is still thought by most scholars to be apocryphal, a hoax, or simply a reference to a group of unscientific cranks.  It is my aim in this article to argue that it is none of these, based on recently uncovered evidence:  the two dozen or so pages that survive of the diaries of Frank (“Franky”) Hammond, and their corroboration of material still accessible in the memorized poetic fragments, scholarly articles, role-playing game scenarios, blues albums, and films noir published by members of the circle. 

The circle formed—originally only three members—in 1966.  What began as an ascetic club soon ventured into code cracking, and after laying the groundwork for a modern aphoristic style, it eventually broadened into an all-encompassing intellectual, artistic, and criminal society.  It is thought that the untimely demise of the group was due to continual tensions and resulting open warfare with the Mafia and other underground rivals, some undoubtedly anarchist in nature.  Most of the manuscripts and core works of the Blacktail Circle were eventually seized and destroyed by these enemies, and were not, as is usually supposed, merely mythical (—not even the infamous Trax Persephone).  Nevertheless, I will argue that this circle was—despite all its ethical and organizational shortcomings—a genuine intellectual phenomenon of unprecedented scope and depth.

The group was a motley crew.  Of eight members, five were convicted criminals (three of these were clinical sociopaths), one was a diagnosed schizophrenic, and the group’s own “genius” suffered from incurable and unimaginably intense migraines (with all the neurotic and occasionally psychotic psychological features that can accompany these).    At the same time, the group included a rock and roll legend; a blues pioneer; a wandering ascetic with no criminal background, a long history of charitable activity, and philosophy professorship at Princeton; a co-inventor of the modern “role-playing game”; an incredibly prolific psychology professor; a practitioner of both eastern orthodox Christianity and Islam; and a groundbreaking theoretical physicist and emigrant from India.  It is, I grant, an unlikely story that such a group could engender any truly interesting new philosophy, rendered still even more unlikely to the imagination by the alleged “complete destruction” of the group’s two core texts (the philosophical treatise Trax Persephone, written by Hamachandra, and the epic poem Blacktail, written by Franky Hammond himself) and the disappearance of even the next two most important (the immense working manuscript entitled The New Art, by Flavia Karadordevic, and the mystically inspired Cosmogonic Cricket by George Lewis).  The last-mentioned Cosmogonic Cricket was actually published (on the blues fame of the author), but only 10,000 copies were actually printed, and fewer than 300 were circulated before the rest were destroyed.  No surviving copies are known to me, and if any were to appear it would be an immense find, despite the obvious difficulties that would accompany the interpretation of a mystical treatise written by a schizophrenic blues artist with no previous writing experience.  (According to Hammond’s diary, reading Cricket was like reading something out of “Talmudic scripture, but with all the naivety of Greek philosophy, and all the obscurity of that of the Germans …”)

The first section of this paper will sketch a provisional history of the Circle, including biographical material on each of its members, as can be pieced together by available evidence.  Once the stage has been set, the second section will review the evidence in favor of the view that the group was (a) extant, (b) academically interesting, and (c) ethically neutral in character, rather than truly criminal.  I will rely primarily on parallels between Hammond’s journal and other surviving materials.  In the third section I will try to sketch out the group’s cosmological, philosophical, and aesthetic world-picture.  This section will be mainly theoretical, but supported in large part by the surviving fragments of the Trax Persephone.

section i

The founder of the Blacktail Circle, born in 1926, was an eccentric and withdrawn art critic from Serbia named Flavia Karadordevic.  She is most infamous for her nationwide search, in the early 1960’s, for two young geniuses to be her polygamous spouses, one of whom was to be the new Prophet of Apollo, and the other the new Prophet of Dionysius.

Her mother was an Orthodox Christian, and her father was apparently a Muslim, but how this fared with the community we have no records to show.  We do know that she remained as loyal a follower as she could to both religions for her entire life.  A child prodigy, she was already studying Philology at the University of Belgrade at the age of 12.  Three years later, while Flavia was working on a senior undergrad thesis refuting Nietzsche, Hitler turned his wrath on Yugoslavia.  Her parents were both killed in the Luftwafte’s infamous 1941 bombing of Belgrade, while young Flavia set out on a lone journey to reach the Soviet Union and freedom from the Gestapo, who she had convinced herself would have no mercy for a Nietzsche critic.

Eventually she found her way to America, where she completed graduate studies in art history at Harvard in 1949.  Struggling against the rampant sexism in academia at that time, she still managed to write a fairly influential dissertation, a theory of aesthetics tempering the ideas of Nietzsche with those of Schopenhauer and Kant.  Though her work was considered too radical and anti-rational by most, the rampant positivism arising in America at the time left the field of art history relatively untouched, and due to her perseverance and natural genius she even found a professorship at Columbia University, where she achieved tenure (after another terrible battle) in 1955.

For years, Flavia struggled to make connections among her peers.  However, her completely eclectic interests prevented any of her professional relationships from blooming until she founded the Blacktail Circle in 1966.  During the interim, her exclusive enthusiasm for the “low” arts—including everything from J.R.R. Tolkien to noir film and rock and roll—earned her nothing but derision from her traditional-minded and all-male contemporaries.  (It has been suggested that she was a bit ahead of her time in this respect, among others.  Note, for example, that Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” wasn’t published until 1964.)

According to surviving essays written by Flavia during this period, her interest in the low arts stemmed from an almost personal conviction that they signaled the modern revival of the Dionysian spirit, as well as the intellectual idea that all new and vital art is essentially popular and “low.”  Her thinking in this vein reached a sort of climax in 1957 with the dual publication of “The Iliad and Modern Physics” and “Rock and the Dionysian,” heralding the dawn of a new tragic art born from the synthesis of the two.  Their lukewarm reception immediately turned cold when she announced, in 1959, at the age of 33, that she would drop her post at Columbia (her colleagues were overjoyed), gather up her immense savings (she had had a professor’s salary, no family to support, and an exceedingly ascetic lifestyle), and embarked on a journey across the country to find her two “Geniuses of the Age,” one of rock and roll, the other of theoretical physics.

*

Whether this behavior demonstrates that Flavia Karadordevic had gone mad will be discussed at a later point in this essay (where I suggest that she was quite likely a clinical sociopath, as evidenced also by subsequent behavior).  Nevertheless, the results of her search are no less than striking.  At this point Flavia was likely the world expert on rock and roll as an artistic, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon.  Soon realizing that the true source and inspiration for rock music was actually the blues, she promptly took to the deep south to find her blues “aesthetic genius.”  Unlike her academic peers, many musicians and beatniks she met during this period (late 1959 to early 1961) found her fascinating and mysterious, and soon she took on an aura of sagacity among blues and jazz musicians in Mississippi, St. Louis, and Chicago.  Nevertheless her quiet and distant manner still kept her from making any truly close friends, until she was introduced to a black man who was reputedly the best blues guitarist of the day, George Lewis.  Lewis could outplay most blues and even jazz musicians on almost any instrument, and on the acoustic guitar he was utterly unrivaled.  He remains famous as one of the major innovators in blues and gospel music, but unfortunately his central role in the Blacktail Circle remains almost completely forgotten, except as an occasional “interesting” side-note to his blues fame. 

Flavia was more ecstatic to meet this man (only 25 at the time—ten years her junior) than any she had encountered on her travels so far.  And, what is initially surprising, she had no trouble making him her lover and converting him to the cause.

However, we should not be too surprised, given the following factors.  First, though Lewis was socially outgoing, he was also very odd (clinically schizophrenic, in fact) and had never managed to be with a woman up to this point.  Second, despite his fame among the most skilled musicians, he had had little popular success and was in dire monetary straights, whereas Flavia still had a substantial savings.  Third, we know from Hammond’s diaries that she was not trying to convert Lewis to any sort of academic philosophy or worldview (this would be impossible, since Lewis only had an 8th grade education), but rather to an ascetic lifestyle she had developed for herself based on her religious beliefs and aesthetic theories.  Lewis, who had divergent religious tendencies, found this new spiritual horizon exciting.

Too exciting, as we will see, because over the years Lewis eventually lapsed into complete psychosis and institutionalization.

*
The interracial love affair between Flavia Karadordevic and George Lewis, starting in early 1961, created a furor in blues music and academic circles (which quickly died down in the cultural climate leading up to the civil rights act of 1964).  But even as early as the summer of 1961, after being together for just three months, Lewis went on tour and Flavia took off on the next leg of her quest:  to find her budding Apollo.  She went directly to Princeton.

Her reception among the theoretical physics community there was, unsurprisingly, quite cool.  While flattered that a well-known art historian would take so much interest in their discipline, they were completely confused as to the reason for it, which she had trouble explaining without saying too much.  Nevertheless, she was persistent in her wooing, and by this point, despite her undying social reserve, was becoming proficient at making the rounds at social gatherings of all sorts, from classy cocktail parties to beatnik drug parties.  Most became convinced that she was there to write a popular book or biography.  She was soon tolerated as a bizarre, if strangely fascinating, addition to the Princeton social community, which included the likes of mathematicians Kurt Gödel and André Weil, and physicists John Wheeler (the so-called Father of the Atomic Bomb) and E. P. Wigner (known as the Silent Genius, and thought to rival the late Einstein in profundity if not prominence).  In fact, Flavia managed to sit in on seminars of all sorts, scientific as well as literary.  But it was at the parties where she first heard gossip about a new physics genius, utterly mad and reclusive, who had arrived in the country some years previously:  Hamachandra.

…

The Captain’s mare jolted him back awake. From under its hoofs a storm of pebbles and desert brambles scratched at his stiff knees, tearing away at his pants and spurring him onward. How long had he been out? He could ride miles asleep, but he doubted it had been long. The night air still felt the same, crisp and far from dawn. His horse was calm and alert. If they neared the rose the mare would let him know, he thought. A flower like that didn’t let itself go unnoticed. Not this rose, so old and wild…

Dammit, he had to keep riding. His men were waiting for him back in the cave, surrounded, low on ammunition, supplies. Six miserable soldiers, sitting around the fire. They were patient boys, his troop, or they were dupes. Captain—they’d asked him—where are you headed? What’ll we do, sir?

Hell if he knew.

There were no answers to their questions so he hadn’t tried any, just left. He’d snuck past the enemy troops, all asleep anyway, and set out on his mission. Maybe he would bring the rose to his men. Why couldn’t he? Dig it out of the desert then shuffle back in that cave and announce in his curt drawl—Here ya go boys!—and hold it up triumphantly, crimson in the firelight. They would turn to him in waiting and he would summon up another breath of air—The Rose of Immortality.

To the rescue. He would take the flower over to Saul first. Saul—he would say—you’re my closest friend, my right hand man; I owe you my life. The rose is our salvation, I want you to smell it first.

Saul would be touched, in his crusty way. He’d lean in and sniff quickly, covering his bashfulness with abruptness. Then the Captain would go over to Garcia—Garcia: you are our best gunman, a loyal soldier. Tomorrow you’ll lead us out of here.

Down the line from there. His men had an order of their own. Leonard would be next, then Brian, and Rory. Finally he would reach Michael, the youngest of the fighters. The Captain’s name was Michael too, but only Saul knew that. Michael—he would say—smell the rose, then take it with you.

Michael would look confused, put upon somehow, but the Captain would have none of it. He would press on—I’ve seen you eyeing that girl in town, Michael. You’re too young to stick it here with us. You’ll have to smell this now, or you’ll never survive tomorrow, but when it’s over…leave us and take this to her.

I think it’s true love, kid.

The Captain chuckled to himself over the wind. The Old Man had cracked, lost it for sure. Unwound. True love and the Rose of Immortality—it was a cruel time to play a joke on his boys, their last night together. But he was a funny man, they’d never appreciated that. When the squad would swap tales, huddled around the fire, the Captain would make sure to tell the funniest one, but the men would take it in somberly each time. Stiffs.

He could say it now, out for the night, under the stars: bless these men—they were loving, loyal, pieces of wood, as good as anything else for the shredder. He would run back to the cave with a damn rose and push it in their faces—Guess what, boys? Guess. Guess! They would guess all night long with sober faces and when dawn came he would tell them: time’s up. Suppose we’ll have to play again.

Something bitter began to rise up in him, but he shoved it back down. Ahh, he would take them the rose anyway, those stuffy laugh-less suckers. That’s the story he should have told them for a laugh: The Beast and Her Magic Rose. He’d always thought it was a funny one whenever his mother would try to tell it to him. Boys—listen carefully now: my mother used to tell me this tale about a flower, and every time I heard it I’d cry like a baby. He would have to set it up that way, trick them, or they’d never laugh.

His mother had told the tale differently each time and now, searching for a clear story, the Captain could only see her hundred variations. The rose grew from a woman lost and forgotten in the desert—that much remained constant. A forsaken spinster, a young virgin, a pale neurotic, a shy girl, one day she made her way deep into the wilderness. Her family had sent her away, too old; her beau had stood her up and she’d wandered out unthinking; she’d gone exploring on a whim, never imagining she could get lost.

It was his mother’s favorite story, not his. She would tell it to his little brothers, but he was too old for it. He’d never gotten much into fairy tales.

Still, he had remembered this one now for a reason. Instincts should be trusted, he believed. The rose was hidden somewhere in that endless underbrush of milkweed and nettles, and he couldn’t miss it. He should have looked for its trail years ago. He’d been too stubborn, perhaps, but why admit to that? He was still stubborn, and it would lead him to what he needed.

His skin felt rough against the cold leather reins and he squeezed them tighter to muster some sensation. He hadn’t thought of the Rose of Immortality for years until tonight, sitting around that fire one last time. The evening was quiet. There was nothing more for them to say to each other; time had dragged them out too far. They were tired, and the enemy outnumbered them now without a doubt. It was ten to one at least, and they were cornered.

But they had looked to him anyway. Captain? Sir?

Shit out of luck, boys!—had been his only thought, but he couldn’t let that fall out of him. It wouldn’t be proper. Somewhere along the way he’d drawn his lines too close, but looking back he couldn’t see when or how.

Wait for me until tomorrow morning—he’d told them instead, and left.

The girl’s horse had stepped on a cactus and gone wild, leaving her stranded and disoriented in the dirt. She wandered for miles diligently searching for an end to the desert, but as night neared, panic took hold and she began crying out for someone to find her. She yelled and screamed as loud and as long as she could, but no one could hear her over the wind and the miles. Her voice became harsher as the dust caked her throat and desperation set in, but she wouldn’t stop. Her features became fierce and her resolve thickened as she twisted sound out into the sky with all her might, sure someone would hear it. Her skin cracked with the strain and dehydration. But after hours in the dark she felt her strength fading.

In one last, monumental effort, she reached deep and plundered every capacity in her. Putting it all into the cry, she stripped herself down to a howling vessel and threw her scream as sharply into the air as she could. The terrified wail soared through the sky, unstoppable, finally making it all the way to her village. But the cry had become monstrous in its flight. The villagers shut their ears in horror. Her old beau shuddered at the sound; her callous family closed their windows. No one dared heed the call.

Defeated, the girl crumbled to the ground. Her cry fell with her from the sky and planted itself in the dirt beside her, becoming the Rose of Immortality. So the story goes. Whoever finds the rose will be saved from death and solitude. Both of them.

The Captain had always felt that only the dead themselves could roam the desert long enough to find such a silly rose. It was one of the many ironies his mother had never recognized. He would bring his boys the damned flower, his night find, and he would fling it in the fire. We’re dead, boys, we’ve always been dead! Your Captain has been keeping a secret from you all these years with his poker face…

…But what secrets could there be in this day and age? He’d never found one. There were no mysteries hiding under the thousands of faces. There were no hidden treasures. The world constructed its vaults so carefully no one could sneak back in to place the riches.

Well, they’d forgotten to lock tight tonight, he thought with a wry smile. They’d finally slipped up. Was there a key for his, floating around out there, hiding under some rubbish? Had he dropped it somewhere without thinking? Had he given it to someone not to be trusted?

He would bring them the rose and they would look up. Eh Michael, welcome back. They’d pass him the pipe and he’d leave the rose in his satchel—than you, Saul, thank you. A warm breath of tobacco would tighten his lungs, and they’d settle in around the fire for the night. He would exhale slowly and fill the room with his smoke, remembering its old spaciousness now with the rising wisps of tobacco and the flickering shadows in the corners.

The desert shook violently and he found himself hitting the ground, rolling away from his horse’s frenzied hooves. The sky spun and the crazed mare was gone before he could grab her.

But it didn’t matter.

The rose was near—he could smell it. A perfume of spicy cinnamon, dark roasted garlic, and endless traces of unknowable but familiar scents gathered in a steam around him. The flower’s scent wafted up from the ground, more pungent than he had imagined it in his mother’s home, more frightening. But he realized he never had imagined the fragrance of the rose back then. His mother’s story had always ended with a rosebud, the scent locked up tight. He couldn’t see anymore, the night was too thick. But he’d found the rose now, honing in on its heat then feeling it suddenly, moist and velvety beneath his fingers.

Just like nothing, he picked it, and sat down next to the bush smiling. Have faith and you shall find. He’d always known he’d get a happy ending. He twirled the rose in his hand, letting its aroma fill his chest, then spread through his body. No, he wouldn’t take this flower back to the cave. It wouldn’t be proper, not with his men, not with this laugh. Stiffs. They would have to find their own damn rose, some other time.

The sea kings underground were getting restless.
The floor beneath their thrones had come undone.
The clouds above their heads were getting darker.
But the dread within their hearts could find no step.

Why is the floor beneath us crumbling?
Who calls the clouds towards our heads?
What rumbles in our hearts so lately quiet?
What sound within us creeps without?

Surprise, the creepy crawlers whispered…
Surprise, the land beneath cried out…

Arise, my little kings and darlings.
The day is here, and aching to be met.

Lois Lane read her own headline one more time.

SUPER ROBOT AGAIN: SAVES 8 FROM FIRE

It was spare. Informative. Like Bot9 had been on that windy night. “Lois,” he had said gravely, “it simply cannot be. The force of my mechanism is too much for your human form.”

“I can’t bear this, Bot9!”

“Lois. I have done the math. I don’t think we should see each other again.” And with that, he had flown off, disappearing into the night with his super robot speed.

There was a knock on the door. Lois sighed in frustration—-it was Robotta, caked in makeup, ready no doubt to gossip about her latest frivolity. “I’m busy,” Lois snapped, perhaps a bit too harshly.

“Are you sure? You look…I heard about Bot9.”

Lois was too tired to wonder how she knew. “Oh, Robotta…”

 (to be continued)