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.