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.

…