In a previous essay (not on this blog), I briefly profiled architect Christopher Alexander and alluded to his magnum opus, the four book Nature of Order. In this essay, I’ll be reviewing the first two books of the set, The Phenomenon of Life (TPoL) and The Process of Creating Life (PoCL). The prominence of the word life highlights the importance of this concept in Alexander’s thinking. For him, life is a quality inherent in all things, not solely a property of plants and animals. This is not a particularly radical belief. It’s a tenet of Buddhism and Taoism, and is beginning to find adherents among some scientists. The thing is, it’s hard to define life in a way that includes creatures like animals and insects, but excludes things like crystals or complex computer programs. Viruses are a good example of the difficulty; are they intricate crystals that self replicate in certain animals, or are they living beings in their own right? Ask a biologist sometime, and see what he says.

In any event, Alexander defines life very broadly, and believes that it exists in the world around us in varying degrees.

So, right away, we find that he is tackling some big questions: What is Life? What is Space? What is the Nature of Order? These are questions that occupy mystics, and there are some who see Alexander that way. I don’t. He is too practical and hardworking, and he is not too concerned with individual spirituality; his focus is on reforming the built environment but, yes, he addresses… spirit.

Spirit is always threatening to disrupt our lives

I wish I could talk about Christopher Alexander without getting into questions about the meaning of life, but it’s no use; the man continually and infuriatingly will point out the 600 pound gorilla in the room that we’re all trying to ignore – humans are spiritual beings, and the world is a spiritual place. We make demands on our buildings that aren’t satisfied by profit and efficiency. That we so successfully avoid this reality so much of the time explains much, Alexander contends, about the often unsatisfactory nature of the world we’ve made for ourselves.

Spirit is always threatening to disrupt our lives; seen in a certain light, the bureaucratization of our society’s large institutions seems designed to prevent such troubling eruptions—see Franz Kafka, Charlie Chaplin, Michael Moore, et al. It is axiomatic that no priest wants a saint in his parish, but then, neither does the mayor, or the factory owner.

Alexander points out that structure, too, can work against human wholeness and spirituality and this seems logical enough. After all, no one leaves nature to get ‘back to the city’ when seeking peace and enlightenment. There are, of course, exceptions. Beautiful gardens or soaring cathedrals can be engines of transcendence. But these are exceptions that prove the rule; generally speaking, the built environment is perceived to repress human wholeness. Why? Why don’t humans create beautiful living structure as readily as do bees, clouds, trees, or termites?

Nature of Order is a work of great detail and great force that attempts to answer this question. That the question of Spirit comes up, implicitly but insistently, is the work’s strength and weakness. The force of Nature of Order is derived from Alexander’s fearless exploration of the structure of the world, and the proper place of humans in that structure. But it also makes his philosophy threatening… a lot of people just want to build a better house, not wrestle with questions about the ontological grain of the universe.

Alexander’s confidence can resemble hubris; and sometimes he seems to rely overmuch on intuition when making his points. To read his books well, one must surrender to them. Not abjectly, and not forever, but a certain suspension of skepticism, while reading, helps enormously when trying to absorb the material.

The Phenomenon of Life
In Book 1, The Phenomenon of Life, Alexander gives his fullest and deepest explanation of his conception of life, and why it is more deeply felt in some places and things than in others.

Early in TPoL, Alexander describes an incident from his teaching career that succinctly captures many of the themes of his work, and the reasons his ideas meet resistance. He asks his students to compare two things: a picture of a 7th century illuminated manuscript (the Durham Gospel fragment) and the wall of the very auditorium in which the lecture was being held. Then he asked a simple question – which of the two had more life?

The question met enormous resistance. Not because it was hard—nearly every student agreed, albeit reluctantly, that the graceful, calm-yet-intricate manuscript held more life than the postmodern, brass-detailed wall. The question itself was what created resistance. Just admitting that one artifact can have more life than another was disturbing. If it is possible to enhance the life of a building, then it is important to do so; but the question of life is not being addressed in today’s architectural curricula—except by Alexander.

Alexander finds this ability in humans consistently, and he also finds that resistance is common. When asked, people agree with amazing uniformity on the relative amount of life imbued in various objects. Although the question seems strange, it has an answer. But this is astonishing, because it tends to destroy the difference between the subjective and the objective. Science stoutly rejects data which cannot be measured. Human opinions, notoriously squishy, cannot be measured by any known instrument… but what if humans, in aggregate, are themselves effective measuring instruments?

There is another, deeper reason for resistance. Lurking beneath Alexander’s simple question is a much thornier question: if humans respond to the life of a place, and if life can be detected and worked with rather simply, how is it that so much of the built world works against life? Suddenly, the work of a developer or a surveyor moves beyond the question of profit, and into the realm of religion. Faced with this, it is much easier to fight against the question, and the person raising it. But this is denial.

Alexander makes his case for pervasive life thoroughly and with great cumulative force. He begins by discussing what he calls centers:

“In using the word center in this way, I am not referring at all to a point center like a center of gravity. I use the word center to identify an organized zone of space – that is to say, a distinct set of points in space, which, because of its organization, because of its internal coherence, and because of its relation to its context, exhibits centeredness, forms a local zone of relative centeredness with respect to the other parts of space. When I use the word center, I am always referring to a physical set, a distinct physical system, which occupies a certain volume in space, and has a special marked coherence.” (TPoL, p. 84)

Redefining a word as basic as ‘center’—or ‘life’—seems willfully inscrutable at first, but the idea is actually quite useful. Consider a pond in a clearing; it is not exactly a whole in itself, because it is part of a larger whole, the clearing, which is in turn part of a forest, and so forth. But the pond is something, and calling it a center does help us to see it as a locus of interest in the midst of a larger whole, a locus that influences that larger whole. And the idea is recursive; the clearing is itself one of many centers in the larger forest and influences that whole, which in turn is one center of a larger regional whole, and so forth.

Like Alexander’s earlier concept of a pattern language the value of the concept lies in its use. Learning to analyze wholes in terms of centers makes it easier to actually see how a whole is formed, and how it can be strengthened or how it is being weakened. It gives those who are trying to analyze space an effective analytical tool.

If it seems presumptuous of Alexander to redefine a word for his own use and to propose an entirely new way of analyzing the world, well, that is a valid criticism but it is also pretty much the point of TPoL. Alexander is proposing a new way of perceiving and analyzing space—he is proposing the basis for a new theory of the world’s geometric underpinnings. Whether he succeeds or not is for each reader to decide.

Living wholes, then, are made up of strong centers, and the life of a whole is increased by strengthening and increasing its centers. As I began to get comfortable with this idea, I indeed found it to be a useful way of looking at the world around me, a way to figure out why I like some places more than others. TPoL is copiously illustrated, and the illustrations do help to convey what Alexander is getting at. But ultimately, an interested reader will have to decide for himself how useful the idea is.

Alexander continues his argument by explaining why some centers have more life than others. And here, I think, he presents an idea that is extremely compelling and immediately useful. It amounts to a general theory of aesthetics, and will likely be adopted rather quickly in the field of visual arts.

Alexander proposes that there are 15 fundamental properties—structural features—that appear consistently in things which have life. Let’s just list them:

1) Levels of Scale
2) Strong Centers
3) Boundaries
4) Alternating Repetition
5) Positive Space
6) Good Shape
7) Local Symmetries
Deep Interlock and Ambiguity
9) Contrast
10) Gradients
11) Roughness
12) Echoes
13) The Void
14) Simplicity and Inner Calm
15) Not-Separateness

About a third of TPoL is devoted to a masterful exposition of this idea. The 15 properties are shown and discussed in manmade artifacts and in natural phenomena. The illustrations and text work together and gather force like Ravel’s Boléro, culminating in an essay titled A New View of Nature. Ultimately we realize that Alexander has done an amazing thing; he has made it possible to talk, really talk, about why we like some things and places better than others. Rather than falling back on vapid words like ‘pretty’ or ‘awesome’ we can speak with precision about the qualities that distinguish Yosemite Valley from, say, a gravel quarry, or why we are more moved by a giant sequoia than by a mall. His beliefs and accompanying language legitimize human feeling, validate our intuitive sense of value, and, without hubris or solipsism, make the world personal.

I have barely skipped a stone over the surface of this remarkable book. In 476 exhaustively illustrated and footnoted pages, Alexander rigorously makes the case for his new view of the world, and takes initial steps toward a mathematical statement of that view. It is an intellectual tour-de-force and fully supported by his real world work as a builder and architect. Such seriousness commands respect; dismissing Alexander casually will not do.

The Process of Creating Life
Defining life is a good start for Alexander, but the major theme of his career has been actually getting more life into modern buildings. And to do this, Alexander found, more than a definition is needed; the what of creation is pointless without the how. That is, a living building cannot be designed, then built. The life of a building comes from decisions made during the construction process. Design and construction turn out to be pretty much the same thing.

Alexander begins to talk about this by returning to one of Nature of Order’s fundamental questions: why is it that natural processes automatically create beauty and a feeling of rightness, and human methods so rarely do? What is the difference?

In a series of fascinating examples ranging from a wave breaking to a glass plate shattering to a fetus developing, Alexander shows convincingly that development processes in nature are a series of structure-preserving transformations. Each recognizable phase of development follows naturally from the preceding phase. Put another way, each phase of development preserves and extends the wholeness of the preceding phase—the wholeness is never destroyed, it unfolds into a new wholeness.

Consider the famous sequence of photos of a splashing milk drop. Though discrete phases of the sequence are startlingly different from each other, the changes from moment to moment are gentle and comprehensible. Alexander argues convincingly that this is a feature of all natural development.

Furthermore, the structure-preserving transformations can be analyzed in terms of the 15 fundamental properties introduced in TPoL. As extended here, the 15 properties become 15 transformations. Change that preserves wholeness is shown to be a product of transformation based on one or more of the 15 properties. Each transformation introduces, preserves, or strengthens one or more of the 15 fundamental properties. Again, one of the most useful things Alexander has done here is to provide good language, which makes good analysis possible.

He goes on to argue, with multiple examples, that humans can build in this structure-preserving fashion, but usually don’t. To do this, he juxtaposes traditional (or pre-modern) building processes with modern examples. He is getting at something deep here; humans love old places. We visit New England, or Europe, to see the old buildings, not the modern ones. We have a sense that the old cathedrals, the old city layouts, are somehow richer. Alexander contends that traditional building methods followed the structure-preserving process he finds in nature. For example, he presents a series of plans that show the development of Amsterdam from 1400 to 1800. It is easy to see how the steady development process took previous development into account. Patterns that were latent in 1400 are realized in 1800, building shapes echo each other, the relationship of the town to the water is consistent throughout. There is no sense of planned development—Amsterdam seems to have grown.

The structure-preserving process occurs in the modern world, but more rarely. Beginning about 1900, many forces—changes in banking, in zoning, in planning, in architecture, etc.—began to produce structure-destroying transformations. The wholeness of an existing structure was no longer considered. A classic example would be the extension of a freeway through an existing neighborhood. The freeway is designed and built without reference to its surroundings, and thereby destroys those surroundings. And similar examples can be cited ad infinitum: a skyscraper designed on one continent and built on another, a planned community laid out with equal precision on the drawing board and on the ground, a giant Wal-Mart box seemingly dropped from the sky onto its scraped pad… in every case, the previously existing whole is disregarded and destroyed.

Alexander uses these examples to define two kinds of structure: generated and fabricated. Generated structure creates life, and fabricated structure, nearly always, creates… the opposite of life.

The discussion of generated structure begins with an analogy that struck me very powerfully. Consider a fairly complex origami construction. It is not built to a plan; that is, blueprints of the finished structure are not provided. Instead, a sequence of steps is provided. A plan of the figure would be quite complex—several pages at least. But a sequence—first do that, then do this—is relatively concise. This idea is then applied to the development of an embryo. DNA does not store a blueprint of the exact appearance of a particular animal, it stores a sequence of development which then takes place affected by attendant circumstances. Interestingly, this is proved by recent experiments in biology—cloned animals do not look exactly alike. Same sequence, different circumstances.

Brutally compressed into a nutshell, Alexander’s program for creating living structure is to generate a construction sequence that first, observes the whole, then, makes a change that preserves and enhances the whole while approaching the desired end state, then… repeats as needed. Or, in his more elegant language:

“A living process is any adaptive process which generates living structure, step by step, through structure-preserving transformations.”

These sequences can also be called patterns, harking back to Alexander’s early book, A Pattern Language. Here, they emerge as part of a comprehensive program for reforming human construction methods. As argued, the case for reform is convincing and ultimately hopeful. After all, the remaining remnants of traditionally built structure are good evidence that humans can build in a living fashion. As a species we have been unconsciously competent, are now unconsciously incompetent, but are beginning to notice deficiencies—to be consciously incompetent. It certainly seems possible that the human capacity for self-observation must eventually lead to conscious competence, and to a beautiful living world.

PoCL is a massive book, totaling 635 pages with appendices and notes. The illustrations are copious and superbly complement arguments put forth. I have, therefore, presented barely a skeletal outline of the book’s full force, but I hope I have adequately suggested that it is forceful.

In some ways, Alexander is the living human I most admire. He has, after all, come by his ideas the old-fashioned way… he’s earned them. He has poured his life into his writing and philosophizing and then he has done something harder. He has, for decades, tested his philosophy, often in difficult conditions in the poorest regions of the planet. He is, simultaneously, an idealistic ivory tower dreamer and a pragmatic contractor; that dirt under his nails is a mix of grit and ink and it’s been there for decades. When a man so rigorously tests his ideas in the real world, over such a span of time, and then adjusts his ideas to accord with the practical knowledge gained… well, he deserves a hearing.

Whitewater at the Top of the World: Craig Childs presents the story of the first ever passage of Tibet’s Salween River

Craig Childs is an extreme traveler, NPR commentator, winner of the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and author of House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest and The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. In September 2007, Childs joined a 16-person expedition for the first ever descent of the upper Salween River in Tibet. At the time, the Salween was one of the world’s longest, highest, and most remote unexplored rivers, and it promised world class whitewater. After many months of preparation and travel, the expedition arrived in Tibet during record rainfalls, and the Salween was dangerously flooded. Since the river is remote and winds through unknown canyons, embarking was an irrevocable decision to face unknown perils. Childs, a famously compelling speaker, tells the thrilling tale of the Salween expedition with breathtaking images and exclusive video footage.

Fans of Into Thin Air, Touching the Void, and other tales of first-person adventure will want to meet the man of whom the New York Times says, “Childs’s feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he’s a modern-day desert father.”

Thursday, October 15th, 7:00 p.m. at KoKo Cocktails, 1060 Geary Street (at Van Ness), San Francisco

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Remember, Be Here Now, by Ram Dass

Even on the increasingly rare occasions that Timothy Leary’s LSD-popularizing antics are really discussed, the man known then as Richard Alpert appears as little more than a sidekick—Robin, to Leary’s Dark Knight—and his book, Be Here Now, a mere punch line to a forgotten 60s joke. But in the decades since, with Leary’s needle stuck at ‘groovy’ right up until his relatively early death, Alpert’s fully disclosed spiritual struggles, his open record of extreme growth and change, and of course his transformation into America’s own guru, Ram Dass, have left him, perhaps, the greater figure. By any reckoning, he is a scarred and worthy chronicler of a numinous time, and an interesting living experiment that still unfolds.

I had the good fortune to be handed Be Here Now in the midst of one of my very first acid trips, when I was still convinced that there was meaning beneath all the fireworks. I puzzled over it quite happily for hours, imprinted on it, and it has affected my subsequent spiritual life as surely as childhood religious instruction; and like childhood religious instruction, the influence has not always been positive and shaped me by my resistance at least as much as by my acquiescence. For example I, for far too many years, accorded Hindu-flavored spirituality far more respect than I now feel it deserves.

It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets

Be Here Now is actually three books in one. The introduction is Alpert’s tale of the years with Leary, his travels in India, and the encounters with the fabulous guru, Neem Karoli Baba, that remade Alpert as Ram Dass. It is a concise classic of drug writing, a genre that deserves more respect than it gets. The middle, longest, section is a hand lettered and illuminated attempt to convey, experientially, certain verities of the psychedelic experience. It is strange, strangely powerful, and I am not able to capture it in a net of mere words—take strong hallucinogens (or, if you prefer, entheogens) and read it for yourself. And finally, the book concludes with an adequate primer of the aforementioned Hindu-flavored spirituality—meditation, yoga, veganism, etc.—the efficacy of which is demonstrated by the easy competence with which India governs herself and cares for her people. Am I too cynical? Very well, paw through this section yourself and carry away the bits you find shiny… that’s certainly what I did, and I can’t say I regret it.

Separately, none of these parts is indispensable, but like the disparate, ridiculous books of the Bible (have you ever read the Book of Jonah?) when gathered together (along with an excellent bibliography) they amount to scripture. And, like scripture, they can remake your world to the extent you let them.

Alpert/Dass is, it must be said, a substantial spiritual fuck up, but I will always love him for this book, and for the way he once compared the way he figuratively fell on his face over and over to a man making his way to a holy city by means of continual prostrations—it was too apt a description of my own life to ever forget.

Promethea, by Alan Moore

Alan Moore is a literary titan whose medium happens to be comic books: deal with it. The fact is, Moore is positively Joycean in the way he packs layers of meaning into words and, unlike Joyce—or Pynchon, or Wallace—he has the whole playground of image to play with as well.

The substantial success Moore attained with his scripts for Watchmen, From Hell, V for Vendetta, and other titles—and the substantial disappointments he suffered as those graphic masterpieces were translated to the screen—both allowed him and drove him to focus on more insular, idiosyncratic work… one can almost hear him muttering, ‘make a movie of this you effing bastards,’ as he completed his pornographic masterwork Lost Girls, or the swirl of Cabala, sex magick, metaphysics, and superhero mythology comprising the work I extol here, Promethea.

Available in five volumes that collect the original comics, the spine of Promethea is conventional for the costumed vigilante genre: a young lady, Sophia Bangs (pay attention to those names, reader) finds herself blessed/cursed with the ability to transform herself into the curvaceous superheroine Promethea, who is able to fly, shoot beams of force from her caduceus, and so forth. In coming to terms with her new powers, she meets and beats assorted villains, and ushers in the end of the world.

Wait; what was that last part? End of the world? It’s hardly a spoiler to tell you so—from early on in Book One it’s clear that Promethea’s world faces the end of history.

But not by nuclear annihilation, as in Watchmen, but by Armageddon, Kali Yuga, Ragnarök, or some other name drawn from the end time theologies so often found in human spiritual systems. In her quest to understand her role as Destroyer, Sophie/Promethea thoroughly explores the Western esoteric tradition.

In his personal life, Moore is an accomplished ceremonial magickian and here, like Philip Pullman in His Dark Materials, he uses an exciting, bawdy, page-turning tale to sugarcoat serious philosophical instruction. The attentive reader will come away from Promethea with a useful grounding in tarot, cabala and the tree of life, Crowleyan ritual, and will even get an intriguing and accurate glimpse of Goetic demonology.

More importantly, by reading this book and letting it’s glorious graphics seduce you, you will imbibe a certain mindset and realize at gut level that what we are pleased to call reality is merely an insubstantial scrim imperfectly concealing the actual nature of existence. And as Sophie—and her entire world—are forced to acknowledge, confronting an unveiled all-that-is is both terrifying… and thrilling.

Travels, by Michael Crichton

I’m a little embarrassed to admit it, but the fact is, I like Michael Crichton’s novels and have read most of them. And of course, I’m not alone in that—Crichton’s books have sold 150 million copies worldwide. But relatively few have read Travels, which makes sense because it’s pretty much the opposite of a ‘Crichton book’. It’s short not long, it’s a memoir not thriller fiction, and it’s written in a graceful, unaffected voice, not the thudding, heart-pounding! thriller prose that Crichton mastered long before writers like Dan Brown or David Baldacci began to hammer readers over the head with it. I think he missed his audience with this one; Travels is not for the average thriller reader.

As you might guess from the title, Crichton is here writing a travel memoir but, crucially, he includes inner journeys as well. Beginning with his experiences as a 6’9” medical student who put himself through medical school writing potboilers—and the The Andromeda Strain—and continuing with multiple world trips, and his experiences meditating, directing movies, learning to see auras, tripping intensely, bending spoons, diving with sharks, etc. etc. His clear exposition of the events experienced and of his own mental state while they unfolded is what makes Travels remarkable. Also, his motivation for writing Travels is unimpeachable; he certainly didn’t need the money, and must have known that this book wouldn’t make him much anyway. Nor would it exactly burnish his reputation… the questing, skeptical-but-believing Michael Crichton on display in Travels is not the Michael Crichton he would want Hollywood agents to negotiate with.

So ultimately, Travels is immensely credible. Crichton tells me that he learned to bend spoons one evening, and I believe him. He tells me that a weekend workshop gave him the gift of seeing auras, and I start looking for such a workshop to attend myself…

And thus is reality undermined.

His Dark Materials, by Philip Pullman

Just to get it out of the way, yes, these are Young Adult novels. And they’re based on Milton’s Paradise Lost… or so I’m told. But so what?—we must take wisdom where we find it, and in the three books of His Dark Materials—The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass—Pullman is not only wise, but brave, taking on, as he does, conventional religious thinking in general and the Catholic Church in particular. Most reviews of His Dark Materials focus on daemons, the animal-guised, familiar-like soul analogues that Pullman brilliantly fishes up from exceedingly deep archetypal waters and, yes, daemons are cool but for my money even more attention should be paid to his frankly anti-church agenda; read at the cusp of adolescence, these books will effectively immunize against excessive religiosity. I read them when I was struggling with my own religious addictions—I’m a recovering fundamentalist—and they were the kick in the ass I needed to actually change.

None of this would matter if Pullman was preachy or didactic, but fortunately—and unlike myself—he is neither. Instead, he couches his serious life lessons in a compulsively readable coming-of-age tale, set against a backdrop of witches, armored bears, dirigibles, and passages between worlds. As you are pulled from page to page, you will also be reordering your views on spiritual expression… so read with care.

My Life With the Spirits, by Lon Milo Duquette

Though I have cast spells, performed sex magick rituals, and worshipped my patron goddess Ostara under a full moon at Summer Solstice, the fact is I am a dilettante, not a practicing magickian. But even an armchair magickian must read astonishing quantities of written material, for surely it is the wordiest of hobbies, with tome after tome devoted to the arcana of divination, cabala, Crowleyan ritual, chaos magick, Enochian scrying, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. And in all this vast, mostly fascinating, swamp of literature there is one writer, Lon Milo Duquette, who stands apart because he sees himself with without illusion, and because he writes with exceptional clarity, self-deprecation, and humor.

His Chicken Qabalah is a useful and lucid explication of how and why a non-Jew might explore Cabala for spiritual purposes, Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium is a perfectly acceptable primer for those interested in Western ceremonial magick, and should you decide to flirt with high strangeness and engage the Beast directly, you can have no better Virgil than Duquette in his books, Understanding Aleister Crowley’s Thoth Tarot, The Magick of Aleister Crowley: A Handbook of the Rituals of Thelema, and Aleister Crowley’s Illustrated Goetia: Sexual Evocation.

But before you read any of these (and even if you have no intention to read these, or any, books on magick) read My Life With The Spirits: The Adventures of a Modern Magician. Like three other books on this list, it is a memoir of alternative spirituality. Conventionally autobiographical, My Life With The Spirits follows Duquette from early childhood through delightfully rock-and-roll-and-magick infused hippie years, and into an adulthood as a sober and respected bishop of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Like all my favorite people, Duquette has a zest for direct experience and he exuberantly dives into yoga, communal life, magickal ritual, and whatever else captures his interest. And he writes up his experiences with the brio and humility that I associate with truth telling. His tales of Goetic evocation, for example, are masterpieces of immersion journalism: accurate, frightening, and funny.

Duquette’s writings undermine my grasp on conventional reality because they have the ring of truth. Based on my own (relatively trivial) magickal experimentation and his clear reporting, I am forced to accept that demons (and angels) are real and can act on our plane, that Enochian calls effectively summon visions of another world, and that a dead kitten can, under the influence of the right prana master, be restored to life.

Perhaps the most refreshing aspect of Duquette’s oeuvre is his attitude of, if you will, ‘dogmatic agnosticism’. He doesn’t insist that you believe him, doesn’t attempt to convert, and freely concedes that everything unusual that he experiences may well be ‘all in his head’. “But,” he continues (a little dogmatically), “you have no idea how big your head is!”

Living With Joy, by Sanaya Roman

I didn’t set out to become a fan of channeled material, and I can’t tell you how I came across Living with Joy: Keys to Personal Power and Spiritual Transformation, but in the six or so years that have passed since I abandoned fundamentalist Christianity no genre of literature has affected me more profoundly. Seth, I confess, is too intellectual for me, but Abraham and sometimes Kryon move me profoundly. And though he has a relatively small following—bad PR?—the entity who styles himself Oren, channeled by Sanaya Roman, has gradually and completely upended my world view, and Living with Joy is my bedside scripture.

There may be more to this world view than I am able to express, or I may be distorting it—I’ve been forced to admit in recent years that I am able to grasp only a small fraction of the data presented to me—but here is some of what I have gleaned:

• The all-that-is actively engages with individuals, reshaping itself to conform to an individual’s basic beliefs and expectations about reality. The all-that-is is like a nervous new lover, eager to conform to the beloved’s illusions.

• Our basic beliefs and expectations about reality are entirely within our control. Which is to say, the suite of beliefs we use to order and understand the all-that-is are choices, not understandings or deductions or inevitabilities. Likewise, we are free to expect whatever we like. Note: this is not to say that we control the all-that-is. It is more as if the all-that-is is an agreeable maestro, presenting itself in a way that is consonant with the observer’s disposition. But even so, certain verities persist, which is why day-to-day reality does not shift instantly to accommodate our fancies, as in a lucid dream.

• This being the case, it makes sense to deliberately choose our beliefs and shape our expectations so that we gradually create the most enjoyable life possible. We can also, incidentally, change our pasts by deliberately reinterpreting our memories.

• There are myriad techniques that accomplish this restructuring: prayer, spells, visualizations, drugs, ritual, are just a few effective examples. Different entities tend to focus on different techniques.

• You can start now.

By dipping into Living with Joy regularly, my thinking has gradually taken on this world view. I now pay attention to the tenor of my thoughts, state my goals in positive language, assume responsibility for my circumstances, etc., etc. And consequently, reality is now different for me. Delightful synchronicities abound, I live in freedom, experience joy, and no longer feel that I am a victim in a hostile environment. My fundamental belief about the way the world works is that the all-that-is is a wish granting machine, and that it dances with me every day.

Cosmic Trigger, Robert Anton Wilson

I didn’t realize until compiling this list that I have read a lot of spiritual memoirs, and have been largely remade in their image. None have affected me more profoundly than Robert Anton Wilson’s (PBUH) Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati, the essential first volume of his three volume autobiography.

For me it has always been books, not teachers, that appeared when I was ready, and Cosmic Trigger showed up when I first decided in my heart—where it mattered—that I could no longer abide the fundamentalist Christian cult I had faithfully espoused for the first 17 years of my adult life. I knew others who had left what I was then pleased to call, “The Truth.” Some were always sad or bitter, some fairly groveled in their efforts to reinstate themselves, some gave themselves over to unattractive dissipation, and at least one—a smart fellow, like me—was dead of suicide. I didn’t know of any, at the time, who had made a success of their heresy and infidelity, none who had attained the happy, creative heathenism that I so craved.

Cosmic Trigger broke me open like a thunderbolt, like the divine bolt of lightning that is seen in the tarot’s Tower card, redefining an individual existence. It was Wilson’s contention that we all live in “reality tunnels,” self-manufactured existences made up of our beliefs, hopes, and fears about the way things ‘really’ are. Had he said only this, it would have been enough, for just the phrase and his explication gave me a way to understand and work with the morbid eschatology I had lived within for so long.

But Wilson went further, describing his experiments with “rapid brain change.” In his efforts to overcome a “normal” Catholic upbringing (and parenthetically, I have always found it fascinating that so many interesting writers have Catholic school in their past—might the need to assert themselves early against an ancient propaganda set them on the road to literature?) Wilson deliberately made use of the brutal shocks to consciousness available via psychedelic drugs, taboo violation, ceremonial (especially Crowleyan) magick, the books of James Joyce, Sufi exercises, and the like. And by writing constantly and surrounding himself with a good wife and good friends, he managed to integrate the inrush of change that resulted and ended up—at least by his own estimation—a happier and saner man.

I copied him. I ingested LSD and psilocybin and salvia divinorum and lots of pot, I donned ceremonial garb and performed pagan rites, and I attended Sufi dances. And I found my own way, as well; since the cult to which I had formerly been faithful especially reviled tobacco and tarot, I bought myself some fine cigars and learned to smoke them while laying out a Celtic cross, and since I had so repetitiously heard that the Boss of all-that-is hates extramarital sex I made sure to have some ASAP. And I’ve done other things, too, meditations and visualizations, group sex and odd sex, sought out strange places and strange companions, and through it all I wrote constantly and surrounded myself with good friends… the wives came and went. And of course I had the guidance of Wilson himself, via his many books, and I have to say that at the end of it all I am—by my own estimation—a happier and saner man.

Cosmic Trigger is, of course, more than an extreme self help program. Wilson’s thoughts on personas, for example, are revelatory and his insights into the writer’s life remain a guide for me. Most of all, he tells his tales of an interesting life and philosophy in the whiskey-warmed, unpretentious voice of an ideal barstool companion.

Buy it, read it, live it. You have nothing to lose but all your illusions.

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About two years ago I recorded an interview with writer and extreme traveler (and personal friend) Craig Childs that focused on his recently released book, The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. The interview first played on KVNF in Colorado, and was subsequently picked up and played on PRX. I was very happy with the way it came out, and if you like you can listen to it here.

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to Sandy it was like working in his own projected brain

Pedro Guerrero, better known as the chief chronicler of Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and work, had a similar long term relationship with another eccentric, creative titan, the altogether more lovable Alexander Calder. This beautifully produced book, full of simply stunning photographs of Calder in his various homes and workshops, is not a conventional study of Calder’s oeuvre (there are dozens of these), but rather a very intimate look at how Calder lived, and how his eccentric, joyful environment was part and parcel of his unique and astoundingly prolific (more than 16,000 pieces are catalogued) artistic output. The pictures of Louisa Calder’s kitchen, with barely a spoon not crafted by Calder himself, are worth the price of the book. From the text,

“Believing it almost a sin to buy something he could make himself, Sandy would drop anything he was involved in, no matter how important, and beat out a roasting pan for Louisa or fashion a large-capacity serving ladle or a sieve. This do-it-yourself dictum was undoubtedly a carryover from their earlier, leaner days, but it had become an obsession with Sandy.”

A creative artist of any kind—writer, painter, musician—needs two conditions met in his outer life to be productive for the long haul: a physical space in which to work that he doesn’t have to think about, that is as natural for him to get to and be in as a kitchen table, and, just as important, people around him who are dedicated to smoothing his way, who will see to it that the washing is done, that visitors are handled deftly. Calder had both of these, for nearly his entire career. His homes, in Roxbury, Connecticut and in Saché, France, had multiple workshops and each shop had multiple stations where dozens (and ultimately thousands) of works—mobiles, stabiles, gouaches, jewelry, kitchen goods—lay scattered about, with their attendant tools, waiting for their creator’s hand to turn to them again. To the outsider it looked like a sparkling chaos, but to Sandy it was like working in his own projected brain, with nearly finished thoughts readily at hand. And for smoothing his way, Calder had Louisa.

Louisa Calder, nee James (the grandniece of Henry and William James) met Sandy on an ocean liner in 1929, and less than two years later they were married. It must have seemed a quixotic choice to Louisa’s family. Calder’s signature creations, the mobiles and stabiles, were a few years off, and financial success would not come for a couple of decades. Up until that time he had worked at no particular job, and had exhibited only a few wire sculptures, conventional wooden sculpture and his—eventually—famous circus, a combination of kinetic and performance art to which he would charge admission. But there was something about him…

Louisa lived on for 20 years after Sandy’s death, during which time she published a book, stiffed President Gerald Ford – she didn’t like his politics – and was named Woman of the Year by the United Nations. But during her marriage to Sandy, virtually all of her formidable energies and abilities were bent to the task of keeping him happy and productive. She cooked, cajoled, cleaned, inspired and in general took care of every household detail so that Sandy could spend most of every day in his workshops, doing his godlike puttering. In nearly all of the pictures of the Calder homes, the floors are generously lined with rugs, dozens of them, made of his designs. Louisa hooked them all.

Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder captures all these domestic arrangements beautifully and intimately. The shots of Sandy’s workshops are so crowded with detail that I find myself poring over them for minutes at a time, like my 7 year old son trying to find Waldo. Guererro visited the Calder’s perhaps a dozen times, over a space of several years and it’s possible to see the evolution of some of the objects from scraps of wire to finished work, floating high and soft in one of the Calder’s lofty-ceilinged living rooms.

Though not primarily a writer, Guererro’s text does capture beautifully the texture of the Calder’s life – together with the photos, this is the best book available for getting a feel for what they were like as people, far better than a conventional biography. Guererro, using plain words, describes many of the subtleties of what they were as people. Here, for example, is Guererro relating one incident from his friendship with Sandy:

“When we came to visit him in Saché that fall of 1963, Sandy met my wife, Barbara, and me at the train station. I was dressed like all my fellow commuters in the Connecticut suburbs—in the typical uniform of gray flannel suit and wing-tipped Cordovan shoes worn by one and all streaming into New York City. My French getup also included a very unbohemian velour hat with a tiny feather in the band. I thought I looked pretty spiffy. Sandy shook my hand and gave me an enormous bear hug. That done, he snatched the hat from my head and flung it as far as he could. Calder disdained pretense and couldn’t abide anything he considered sham. Neither of us ever acknowledged the incident, and I never missed the hat… My days of dressing like a banker ended that afternoon.”

Calder at Home does several things well. It is a decent biography of Calder, though it tends to stick to the high points. And it is a reasonable portfolio of Calder’s art, especially the more casual pieces such as toys for his grandchildren, furniture for home use – there is a homemade toilet training chair which his children must have found a little daunting – and the aforementioned kitchen implements. But in the end, the reason to own this book is the excellent documentation of Calder’s home and work life. I know of no other book that captures a major artist’s work environment so thoroughly or so well. Dozens of photographs document the fascinating complexity of a working sculptor’s studio so thoroughly that they can be pored over for hours.

And ultimately, this is a very inspiring book. After reading it, I tried my own hand at making mobiles, materially assisted by tips I gleaned from the studio photos. One of them hangs above my head as I write, like a stray thought or a cheerful daydream.

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Captain Clark welcomes you aboard

Robert Anton Wilson is dead, again, and I’m not feeling so good myself. Wilson— or let’s call him ‘Bob’, as he would have preferred— was first reported dead on February 22nd, 1994. But the reports of his death turned out to be greatly exaggerated: fittingly, Bob had fallen prey to one of the first great Internet hoaxes. However, his second death, on January 11th, 2007, was all too real. Bob died at home, at 4:50 a.m., from complications due to post-polio syndrome.

Bob was, among other things, one of the last great ‘60s figures. He was a friend and collaborator of Timothy Leary, William Burroughs, and Buckminster Fuller, had a bit part in the JFK assassination, was a founding pope of Discordianism and the Church of the Sub Genius, coauthored the The Illuminatus! Trilogy and, in his autobiography Cosmic Trigger, anticipated the sex, drugs and magick movements that started in the ‘60s and continue to this day. That he was also an editor at Playboy Magazine for several years is a characteristic, but minor, footnote to his colorful life.

Bob was first, last and always a writer and his books, for the most part, remain in print. He wrote prolifically for his cult following and is probably best known for the The Illuminatus! Trilogy, the book that made the Illuminati a feature of mass consciousness. But those of us who are, you know, in the cult are probably most affected by the first volume of his autobiography, Cosmic Trigger I : Final Secret of the Illuminati.

In Cosmic Trigger, Bob describes several decades of his experiments in what he called, “self-induced rapid brain change”—that is, experiments with drugs, Sufism, ritual magick, yoga, meditation, tantra, quantum physics and anything else he could find that undermined that peculiar phantom known as, “the self”. The results were intense: Bob experienced psychic flashes, the manifestation of a 6 foot tall white rabbit and the peyote spirit, Illuminati contacts, guidance from the planet Sirius and all the other features of a well-lived psychedelic life. But he also raised a family, was happily married, made a good living writing, and stayed out of jail, mostly—in other words, he was at least as sane as you and me. Actually, what am I saying… Bob was considerably saner than me.

Cosmic Trigger arrived in my life with perfect timing; I was negotiating my exit from a fundamentalist Christian cult, and his teachings helped me to do so with flair, not with the moping, clingy reluctance that I often observed in my fellow religious refugees. That I repeated many of the experiments described by Bob must go without saying, or at least without detail, but I will say that I am richer for them.

So thank you Bob, for gracing the world with your wit and wisdom these many years, for so fearlessly living a free life in a rigid society, and for setting an example of humor in the face of oppression that inspired many, and certainly changed my life for the better. Captain Clark welcomes you aboard.

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It covered my entire buttock region, as Day-glo-colored as a baboon’s…

Though Nicholson Baker is not exactly obscure—his novel Vox may have been the world’s most famous book for a couple of days during the Lewinsky scandal—his book U and I: A True Story qualifies: out of print in hardcover (and teetering in paperback), sent forth virtually stillborn by its publisher (Random House), not widely reviewed, now hard to find, and with a sales trajectory not merely dropped, but thrown down a well, U and I must have seemed a ghastly mistake, at least to those trying to make money off it. Yet I say you should read it. I believe it to be Baker’s best work.

Baker, early in his career, was seized with the idea that he should write about Updike while he was still alive, while “people could still conceivably sneer at him” and, under the influence of this seizure, pitched the idea to an Atlantic editor and when it was accepted felt very much like a dog who has unexpectedly caught a car: now what?

Twitching and squirming (and precisely recording each twitch and squirm) Baker made the brilliant (if lazily self-serving) decision to prepare by not rereading any of Updike’s books—not even to verify quotes! He half-seriously dubbed this technique “deprived recall analysis”, reasoning that what he really wants to write about is Updike’s influence on him as a writer, and he is unpleasantly honest enough to admit that said influence boils down to a stew of misremembered phrases, covetous admiration, and jealousy. However, acknowledging the need to quote accurately in this litigious age, Baker does review the quotes he’s cited, after he has finished the essay. The resulting comments, presented throughout in brackets, are an amusing and occasionally profound gloss on the text, a crackpot Talmudic commentary. “What is wrong with me?” he wails, after correcting one particularly appalling misquote.

What results from this is a personal essay on steroids, sort of an unauthorized autobiography. Not incidentally, it may also be the best intercranial view of the writing process yet published… but see also John Jerome’s The Writing Trade: A Year in the Life, if you like this sort of thing.

There are two things I love about Baker’s writing: his “Bakeresque precision” (Updike’s phrase!) and his ability to obsessively capture the streams-of-thought/motivation/memory that pass through him. No one has ever done this better, and Baker has never done it better than he has in U and I. It is fascinating, funny, and almost scary to read, for example, “I was of course very hurt that out of all the youngish writers living in the Boston area, Updike had chosen Tim O’Brien and not me as his golfing partner. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t written a book that had won a National Book Award, hadn’t written a book of any kind, and didn’t know how to golf: still, I felt strongly that Updike should have asked me and not Tim O’Brien,” and I find myself writhing a bit reading Baker’s moral dilemmas when he writes—for three pages—about the flip flops of intent he experiences when trying to write a simple letter of condolence after the death of Donald Barthelme; he wants to be sincere, but he also wants to be quotable. Who else has so minutely described the base motivations that gust through all of us, even when we are trying to do the right thing?

A caveat: U and I is not comfortable reading, and if you have the feeling after a dozen or so pages that it’s not for you, you’re probably right. Baker is self absorbed—”On the first of November I wrote at length about my ingrown toenail. But it just wasn’t enough.”—and his subject matter can be repulsive, as when he discusses his psoriatic symptoms (“It covered my entire buttock region, as Day-glo-colored as a baboon’s… I had bloody skin under my fingernails from compulsive scratching that I cleaned out as I read…) and his envy of Updike’s more advanced case (“I put off the trip to the dermatologist that I knew was imminent, though, because I wanted to see whether my disease had it in itself to be worse, more consuming, than Updike’s disease… ” [italics mine]); psoriasis, in fact, is a major theme of this odd book. But even if you find yourself repulsed, consider sticking it out. At 179 lean pages, U and I will convince you of two things: that you are not the only one who obsesses unhealthily about minutiae, and that you are very likely better off in this regard than Nicholson Baker.

firing it is almost anti-climactic, though nudists are involved

Catapult: Harry and I Build a Siege Weapon
spent a couple of years in my harem of bedside books, during which time I read it, in out of sequence bits and pieces, over and over and over and over, perhaps 15 times all told. In a sentence, Catapult is about Jim Paul’s desire to build a working catapult, and use it to throw rocks into the Pacific Ocean; he obtains a grant to do so, and persuades his friend Harry to help him build it. That said, the book is nearly perfectly unclassifiable (hence its obscurity) being roughly equal parts how-to, history, meditation on war, art philosophy, travelogue, personal essay and memoir. Too, Catapult is not exactly mass entertainment—though very funny, it is not comedy; historically accurate, it is not exactly educational; a book about the nature of family and friendship, it is too personal and idiosyncratic for direct application to any would-be reader’s family… Catapult is a cipher, and if you read it I promise you will have a heck of a time explaining to anyone around you just why you continue to dip into it.

Paul, now director of the Poetry Center of the University of Arizona, recently spoke with me about Catapult. He was relaxed, unpretentious, and seemed both pleased and bemused that it still has a following after ten years. I asked what Catapult meant to him.

“Well, the catapult was just a vehicle, a way to talk about my friendship with Harry, and about male bonding; and about that time in my life – everything seemed to change after that. Catapult is like a snapshot album for me now.”

After the book was published,

“Harry was pissed off, at first. He said that having a book written about him was worse than having his picture taken. But he got over it. We both became ‘known’ in San Francisco for Catapult. People say he’s not really like that, but he is.”

Finally, I asked Paul how he would classify his book. He laughed.

“I don’t know. Harcourt Brace is going to bring it out as fiction, which seems crazy, because it makes me and everyone I know fictional characters!”

What Catapult is, is interesting. Each page, each sentence even, is gripping in itself and seems inextricably linked to the material before and after so that one is seduced into flipping back and forth from any random starting point, reading the book from the inside like a worm eating its way out of an apple.

Here, for example, is Paul speaking of Archimedes’ invention of the catapult,

“Relatively speaking, human beings were exponentially weaker, both physically and socially, in the presence of these engines of war, and what strength they had began to be valued to the degree to which they had control over the machine.”

This insight is preceded by a fascinating account of Archimedes’ defense of Syracuse, and leads into one of Paul’s central points, that the catapult, as the first weapon of war to rely only incidentally on muscle power, led more or less directly to the elevation of the technologist as a powerful caste in human culture and this is followed, logically enough, by Paul’s first naïve attempt to buy parts for his brainchild and his getting swindled to the tune of 60 bucks. Catapult is a very ‘sticky’ book; I pick it up, intending to read a paragraph or two, and find myself an hour later engrossed in an account of the largest trebuchet ever built, of the Oppenheimer brothers, of drilling holes in spring steel, or of Paul dropping off his mother at summer camp. Paul makes all these fascinating; he even manages, by some alchemy, to make one book out of them.

As Paul says, at heart Catapult is a tale of the friendship between Paul and his friend Harry. Opposites, they need each other to build the catapult. Paul—a writer, medievalist, poet and artist – obtains the grant that funds the project, but actual tools and solid materials render him clumsy and inarticulate. Harry, by contrast, is an aggressive doer and maker and builds the catapult to his own design, arguing with Paul at every step. So Paul couldn’t build the catapult without Harry, but Harry wouldn’t build it without Paul’s goading; to be fair, Harry would have been perfectly happy never building it. So Catapult is partially about how we get friends to do things. Here are the two of them, building a model of the catapult.

“Harry broke up the clock spring when we got back to the studio, snapping it in his bare hands. Then he punched holes in it with a nail, and made a pair of layered wings for the model, which now looked like an odd, squared-off slingshot. He bound the springs into slots in the wood with picture-hanging wire, which he also used for a bowstring, and stole a piece of the boy’s Lego set for a cup to hold the projectile, a marble we found. He wouldn’t let me anywhere near the model. I shouted corrections at him and tried to grab it. Harry just barked at me, pulled the model away and resumed straining over it. Finally I followed him out of the studio, and up the stairs to the roof of the warehouse.”

After the struggle to build the thing, firing it is almost anti-climactic, though nudists are involved. The real action comes a week after the firing when, to satisfy grant requirements, Paul is to give a “presentation of findings”… Harry insists on participating. To say more would be a spoiler, it’s a scene you should read for yourself.

The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life is the real deal: a tough, helpful, and very real take on the craft of creating, actually getting the work done. Beats hell out of Julia Cameron’s masturbatory fantasies in my book—not that I didn’t also enjoy The Artist’s Way. But for those of us actually making a living from writing, painting, singing, or whatever, this is the book to read, know, and live.

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Margaret’s account of the incident reads like a seduction…

Dr. John C. Lilly, whose research into psychedelic drugs and sensory deprivation inspired the movie Altered States, was a gifted scientist, a polymath who made significant contributions in several fields. Lilly’s abiding obsession was communication with dolphins. He studied them for several decades and his beliefs about them evolved considerably; he eventually came to believe that communication between men and dolphins was impeded not by the dolphin’s supposedly inferior intelligence, but rather, by the radically different marine environment which formed that intelligence. Dolphin brains, after all, are as complex as human brains and 20% larger, and in all the animal kingdom, dolphins and humans are the two mammals with the highest brain to body weight ratios. It’s true that humans are virtuoso tool users compared to dolphins, but it’s also true that dolphins pass information amongst themselves at rates up to 20 times faster than do humans. It’s hard to measure pure intelligence apart from psychology; can we be certain that we’re not underestimating dolphins simply because they’re different?

In one attempt to bridge the gap, Lilly constructed a watery apartment in which Margaret, a human, and Peter, a dolphin, lived together for up to ten weeks at a time. Their cohabitation was difficult at first. It seems that dolphins, in nature, are accustomed to near constant erotic play and that Peter’s unrelieved sexual tension made him so boisterous that Margaret was unable to work with him. Interestingly, it was Peter, not Margaret, who resolved the dilemma. Over a period of several weeks he gradually accustomed Margaret to the touch of his extremely sharp teeth—an erogenous zone for dolphins—and eventually persuaded her to relieve him manually. Frankly, Margaret’s account of the incident reads like a seduction, with Peter using tactics familiar to many teenaged boys. But it worked; he and Margaret learned to talk to each other with great precision, attaining to possibly the most profound inter-species communication ever achieved.

I know that that communication was important, but I can’t get past the sex bit. Peter, thrust against his will into an alien environment and forced to interact with an exceedingly strange animal, was nevertheless able to get precisely what he wanted and needed from that strange animal; who, exactly, was training who?
I believe the episode proves Lilly’s point – dolphins may well be our intellectual equals, or even our superiors. But our world views are so intensely different that communication is nearly impossible – at least for us. Some dolphins have learned up to 50 human words, but humans have yet to utter a single syllable of delphinese; from their points of view, we’re  the ones who are slow.

Lilly’s experiments in human-dolphin cohabitation took place in the 60s and have not been repeated since. I find this inexpressibly sad. There is, perhaps, another intelligent species on this planet, a race of peaceful beings who could end our long loneliness. If we could speak with them freely, we ourselves might be transformed… but we’re no longer trying very hard.

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