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.”

In his last novel, VALIS, Philip K.  Dick proposes God to be terrible and wonderful at once, a depth we cannot contain. Thus we split him into two, into Yahweh and Satan, into Vishnu and Shiva, and handle the two aspects separately.

A clown provides another solution. He may remain terrible and wonderful if deflated of all his might, if made infinitesimal, trivial. This is how the Romans sustained things, with their mighty, lecherous Jupiter. I choose chain-smoking clown. I’ll see what he does when I sum him over infinity.

The madmen dissolve themselves into the Universal Oblivion. It tastes like orange juice and sounds like laughter. Or is that their laughter? (Impossible to tell, as they are madmen.)

John Lennon said he was the walrus. This is not the same as Universal Oblivion. He wasn’t mad—he was making a socio-political statement.

But.

His statement got bandied around so much, it might have dissolved by now into the Universal Oblivion.

Walruses–

What else has made it into that dump?

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

My Love Epiphany was in a precarious state. It was the Truth, which had seemed like a stable thing over the two weeks I’d had it, but when flung into its first battle Truth had not fared so well. Oh sure, it had gotten me some smiles, but—the BART ride home was brutally clear on this—the Love Epiphany had not gotten me Love the night before. I couldn’t see where I’d gone wrong.

I stopped by the library first. Allen Ginsburg, Bukowski, Pablo Neruda—I would figure this out, by force if necessary. Then I trekked up the hill to visit Maren at the bead shop. Maren knows everything about rocks and love. If she didn’t have genuine advice, she’d at least make sure I left feeling sexy.

When I arrived, I found Maren with another visitor. He introduced himself as Michael, and I realized he was The Michael. Michael the ‘psychic’, the tarot reader, who’d read Maren’s cards so perceptively she’d cried—the charismatic Michael, who liked to get into her head then ask her out.

Michael stood in the corner of the bead shop, balancing on one leg and holding—honestly—a giant crystal ball. We talked for awhile; I was distracted by my love failure but didn’t mention it. Then with no warning he pronounced:

“Do you know why you don’t see as clearly as Maren and I do?”

“No, why?”

“You have too much emotion.” He paused to look at me then continued. “You’ve had a big realization in the last week or two, but you’re losing it in your feelings. Don’t let it go. Remember: you know what you know.”

Crikey. I muttered some thanks and got out of there.

The engineers construct the monster a crystal throat tube, in their humanitarian project to save the monster’s soul and their utilitarian project to save the world. She’s a bottomless monster, voluminous, hungry, but without the appreciation of taste. Her wet tongue slobbers like an animal over the surface of the earth—her fetal sense dangerously extends itself. She has no form, and inside waves of potential rise up but crash back down in her vacuum. With every crash she grows hungrier and the waves grow larger. They’re light shows, teasing her behind her eyes.

And what eyes. The dark, empty pits frighten the engineers. If they could only get that light show out of her and put it on display, they think, then she’d get what she wanted. If they could tunnel all those waves through the crystal throat tube… That’s what she’s trying to do—poor baby. Then they could feast on her, instead of the other way around. All this hunger of hers is really just the desire to be eaten. All this surface tension, and she just wants to melt.

KillBill: hey there, lukks
Luki: billy boy, i missed ya
KillBill: ya. went to the refrigerator, then the store. But now i’m BACK
Luki: GREAT
KillBill: so what are you up to??
Luki: there was this fat bird on the line outside. i killed it. with that shotgun you gave me for my bday. there’s blood everywhere man. what about YOU?
KillBill: shitz
Luki: shitz?
KillBill: i got them bad
Luki: gorgeous
Luki: well… ttyl i guess. wish you were here.
KillBill: me too. shit. bird is delicious.
KillBill: bye

It’s true.  Life is a dream. You are the maestro. Welcome, maestro.  For you we have prepared this cushy chair and this luxurious feast. Please, settle in for the show.

What? Your baton? The podium?

Maestro, I think there has been a misunderstanding. The music has already been written down and distributed.  The musicians have learned their parts. Who is going to look up for a man twirling a wand?

No, not even the estimable you. I’m sorry, maestro. Please, make yourself comfortable.

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.

I’m riveted to a daydream that plays over and over again in my brain. I swim laps to it in the backyard pool, remembering awkward shadow daydreams of ten years ago. A fat bird struts on the power line and I try to laugh about it. I see you, fat bird!—and I try to shake the daydream beast off. Clouds stream over the mountain and break up into sunshine rays; construction workers in the arroyo chainsaw to salsa music. Fat bird sings. Everything is laid out for me—everything is ready for the laugh.

But I’m too serious today. I am downright grim.

I go get Nietzsche, the most hilarious man. He may need some extra effort from me right now, I know, so I flip to a juicy aphorism and visualize all his Over-men as Over-clowns—it is an honest attempt, it came to me last night—there are carnival overtones—but I watch as, to my horror, the clown remains serious. He is an unshaven hobo clown, too tired for tricks tonight, just wants to smoke his stogey.

“Everything sinks.” he tells me. It’s the new law of the circus, “Even your mother, full of blubber: she sinks like a stone!” And he laughs an evil, serious, rasping hobo clown laugh.

This might be a conspiracy, I think. It might be a change in the laws of physics. I knew things wouldn’t sit still for me in El Paso. I run back to the pool and throw in a stick. It sinks like lead. This is why the pool looked so clean! I realize. No bugs float on the top.

The guilt sets in. Maybe I did this—I might have when I turned everything into clowns. I dreamt it last night and now I’ve gone and done it. I don’t think things through.

I run back inside. Nietzsche, I say, I take it all back. No good comes from the carnival! I flip open my journal and cross out a whole paragraph of crap. ‘Universal clowns’, ‘shrunken levity’—fuck me. I deserve this.

Then I rush back outside again with another stick.

It sinks. Damn.

She knew right away the answer was: Mu! It was a dumb question and had she trekked up a mountain for it, the old Zen master would have hit her with a stick and yelled it: “Mu!” Why won’t this boy love me? Does a dog have Buddha nature? Who killed JFK? Mu! Mu! Mu! She had too many of these questions, though, to trek up a mountain with.

Instead, she went to the ocean, strapped them to her back and jumped in. Mu is for sissies.

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.

(go to: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

People had always wondered about the end. The branch of human thought devoted to the development of the universe— cosmology— generally included a section devoted to theories on the end— eschatology. Eschatological speculations were interesting while they lasted. Ideas ran from ascension, thermodynamic decay, tide of chaos, cosmic implosion—to fire and brimstone, battle, peace, glory, and oblivion. Many theories came close to the mark—most theories, in fact. But the necessary determinism of any eschatological answer overlooked a key feature of fate: chance.

Perhaps the universe was doomed from the day Jean Paul Renault unleashed his Principle. Certainly, from that point on, destruction of some magnitude was unavoidable. But if he had initiated the sequence to Ultimate Destruction, its inevitability remained hidden until the last instant. The delicate point of equilibrium required for the universe to explode was attained by the play of such erratic forces that any calculation of an outcome would have been impossible. A hair in another direction and the crucial momentum would have collapsed. Fortunately, after 2299 or so, no one wasted their time trying to guess at ends. Instead, Gardening spread across the world, and with its grand influence, eschatology was dismissed.

The adoption of Gardening as the main pursuit of mankind was the immediate consequence of the murder of Brother Edgar. Renault’s act was enigmatic, but its violence silenced debates over the truth of Edgar’s discovery. The reactionary outburst displayed to the world an immaturity, in the face of progress, that people could no longer stomach. All reasonable people were shocked into seeing that Brother Edgar’s find was of revolutionary importance, unavoidable, unparalleled in human history—and the events transformed a surprising percentage of the world’s population into reasonable people. Thus it was decided by society that the time had finally arrived for all utopian daydreams to come to fruition. Renault was deemed a madman.

After their new beliefs settled, people found psychic projection easy to achieve. Confidence and a little concentration were all it took to get their backyard plants moving. It was fundamental; no one found themselves entirely lacking. A new enchantment with reality uplifted them, and change came swiftly and effortlessly. Local structures transitioned naturally into independent Gardens, almost covering the globe in their escalating glee—ballets of growth and color, swelling plays of form and matter burst out from the plots of land and matured elegantly into writhing webs and towers. Each garden was an individual masterpiece, never constant over time, a unique profusion of harmony and vitality.

In the cheer and spirit of Gardening, a cosmology was put forth whereby the universe would never die. The universe had Volition and could choose to continue, just as man had and could. Simplicity and clarity guided the Gardeners in all their thought. With some experimentation, they found that metaphysics remained pleasantly consistent when cut down to three concepts. Volition, one, was the combination of the other two: Will and Willing-but-Willed Action. This was the simplest and clearest schema they could maintain. Within it Renault’s Principle was inconceivable. When the issue arose, the Principle was muddily dismissed as both immoral and impossible, but it rarely came up. There was no room in the magnificence of Gardening for the agitation, the meandering desires and frustrations that would nurture such a dangerous idea.

But in the wastelands outside the Gardens, reasoning was not so easy. There was an element in the world that remained incurably aloof to the beauty of Gardening. Like everyone else, they turned to plant work, but the movements they created couldn’t succeed in captivating them. Everything fell flat. There was a distraction which defeated their focus and left their dances uninspired—a nagging image of something greater. They were unable to shake the stubborn notion that it was the spectacular Renault who was the real revolutionary, not Edgar.

Unfortunately for these outliers, there was no immediate answer to their doubts. Distrustful of the repression of the Principle, they couldn’t buy into the Gardeners’ notions of utopia. But neither could they provide a strong counterpoint, a decisive inflammation of the Principle of Equivalence. The driven clarity an explosion demanded was elusive, and impossible to muster from the scattered confusions and suspicions they had been left with. Incapable of incorporating themselves into the new world, they became unattached, solitary vagrants, making their way through the scraps Gardening had left behind.

The endeavors of these wanderers were torn. Fires flickered but never consumed them. Forms and dances flowed effortlessly but never gripped them. On one side a wild, luminary impulse taunted them, while on the other the melancholy escape of psychic play called to them. In the uncultivated lands, their drives flailed for direction then atrophied in the unforgiving elements. Their gifts seemed destined to flounder, steps toward something that could be, but that they could never lock onto.

Some lost themselves in wonder, hypnotized by the responsiveness of life their new powers revealed—the world would give under their look and they would give right back, falling into the pulse and undulation of every moment. Some laughed uncontrollably and made dances that mimicked fires and little fires that grew like plants. Some became lackadaisical, others turned angry. Unchecked in the open wastelands, the outcasts grew wild. They were maniacal with time, or they were broken.

But when nothing mattered anymore, and every one of them agreed on that, they finally found their answer. The fire-mad look in their eyes had drawn them together and wound them so tight; their lunacies had flared so colorfully and ridiculously for all to see—there was no other option. They began to Party. They were Revelers of course, Hedonists, spectacular growths of their own making with a limited time on this planet. They called themselves the Pyromaniacs—their party lasted 400 years.

(go to part 6)