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| The Grateful Dead in 1965 |
If you are new to the Band, this post is an introduction and overview of the point of this blog. Older posts are in the archive on the right. Shorter occult posts have their own menu page above. The Band on Gab
The last few occult posts have been using the psychedelic counterculture of the 60s as a way to look at the larger de-moralization and inversions that took over American society. Up to this point, we've been setting the stage by trying to understand how "culture" became hypocritical, media-generated, materialist conformity spun by globalist sociopaths that hate the West. The last post compared it to a mass enchantment because of the suddenness and completeness of the illusion. How else do you replace organic American society with a de-moralized parody, destroy the parody with equally fake and de-moralized counterculture, all the while pretending this is "how we are"?
Now it's time to move into the psychedelic occult directly, so we can see how this glamour or illusion actually worked. Understanding what happens helps us see through similar manipulations and reconnect with actual wisdom from our real cultural heritage.
Ken Kesey, Signboard, Pass the Acid Test, mid-1960s, paint and paper on plywood, National Museum of American History
The next few posts will work off the Acid Tests, a group of relatively insignificant events on the surface, but with outsized influence and tied to the big patterns of illusion and decline that we keep running into. These were basically proto-raves - with LSD and intense blues-based jam music instead of molly and electronica - connected to author Ken Kesey and his so-called Merry Pranksters and written on by Tom Wolfe.
They're also a perfect microcosm of the larger fake culture of post-War America that we've been looking at. Over the next few posts we will be looking at different aspects of the Acid Tests to get some insight into the glamour that ensorcelled the country.
Here's the official story on the origins of the Acid Tests in a long quote from an article accompanying an interview with Kesey.
The acid test parties began after Kesey’s experience with mind-altering drugs as a volunteer test subject for Army experiments in 1960 (later revealed to be part of the CIA’s mind control experiment, Project MKUltra). Kesey stole LSD and invited friends to try it with him. In 1965, after Hunter S. Thompson introduced Kesey to the Hell’s Angels, he expanded his test parties to real happenings at larger venues, beginning at his home in La Honda, California. Always present was the music of The Grateful Dead, who debuted under that name at one of Kesey’s parties after losing their original name, The Warlocks. The cast of characters also included Jack Kerouac’s traveling buddy Neal Cassady, Allen Ginsberg, and Dr. Timothy Leary. Out of what Hunter Thompson called “the world capital of madness,” the psychedelic counter-culture of Haight-Ashbury was born.
Just a harmless CIA mind-control subject stealing acid from the government, hanging with that group of characters, and crossing the nation preaching parasitic self-indulgence and the willful destruction of American culture. And a very specific kind of destruction - overloading the mind on hallucinogens and sensory stimulus until the ability to make moral judgments is swept away. This piece is indicative of the mixture of naivety and stupidity of psychedelic counterculture thinking. If you bother to look at it, note the gulf between the tone of quasi-mystical wonder and what was actually going on.
The photo is from the link. The unasked question: "shattering the arbitrary boundaries between performer and audience and life itself during the 1960s" or retard freaking out from a chemical?
Remember, acid is an artificial, chemically-induced state that just messes up your ability to process sense data (click for a post on this). But it can be trippy and captivating - leaving you passively fixated on a chemical slide show in your own head. Where odd visuals make something as simple as turning on the light deeply fascinating. But you don't do anything. You may notice some unexpected relationships between things, but this barely qualifies as minor insight. Not exactly a life plan. All the occultist lies about doors of perception and higher consciousness amount to nothing more than drug-addled midwits spinning whatever blather lets them justify lives of passive stimulation.
Lawrence Schiller photographed the Acid tests. The top photo is his - that's the Dead enlightening in the foreground. The lower photos are from a different site and capture the class and values of the movement - Hell's Angels at the Acid tests in 1966, and Ken himself as a "father" figure in 1971.
Look at them. These a-holes preached the opposite of accountability, intellectual development, or anything needing effort and cumulative achievement for mindless hedonism. Less "gurus" than protoplasm twitching in response to chemical stimuli - the perfect heroes for morally vacuous worshipers of hollow appearances and media lies. This link has recordings of some of the acid tests - some of the music isn't bad, but the "comedy" and pearls from the Pranksters are painful.
How could this be appealing? The next few posts will try and square this circle by looking at different elements of the experience and what they reveal about the larger culture. Let's start with the format. Put aside the cringeworthy "profundities" - everyone was on acid, so intellectual coherence wasn't really the goal.
Gilbert Shelton, Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #1, 1st Printing, 1971, Rip Off Press
The drug is actually one of the draws - recreational drug use was one of the ways that the counterculture rejected the hypocritical fake culture of their parents, and the acid tests put drugs at the center. Like a Freak Brothers comic, the entertainment could outright suck, and the overt drug use and degeneracy were sufficient to draw any number of mummers looking to show how edgy and rebellious they are.
In fact, they probably didn't even need a name - a plain sign saying "Drugs and Degeneracy" would have had the same effect.
But the drugs were just part of it. In this post, we will start to look more closely at music, the counterculture's medium of choice. But let's do so in a way that turns to some traditional Western wisdom as an alternative to gyrating and twitching like fevered animals while society unravels.
Remember - modern media world is the opposite of tradition because it is all appearence and no substance. Literally just a glowing screen with speakers.
But it has to provide an endless stream of stimulating experiences for self-indulgent and de-moralized couch sitters in an unheroic and hypocritical culture.
With no substance to build real connections, it has to rely on novelty - the next cool thing!
The mass-marketed consumerism that came with it is similar.
Think about inducing people to blow resources and incur debt for things they neither need nor really want, and may already have. Then think about reorienting civic values from faith, family, and community to brute acquisition of stuff - stuff whose future obsolescence and replacement with the next new thing comes with the purchase. Novelty as a measure of desirability.
Quick aside/rant
TV happiness shared by all the family!, 1951 Motorola Model 17F6 ad from Time Magazine
The Band understands how surviving the Depression and the war years could leave a population with a heightened awareness of the importance of thrift, personal and civic responsibility, and reality-facing governance that pursued the good of the nation. Basically anti-fragility and institutional accountability to guard against similar catastrophes from recurring. We can also understand how those experiences could make you more susceptible to liars promising these things for their own aims.
What can't be understood or forgiven is using it to justify burning morality, heritage and truth on the altar of Mammon.
You could Guess what car they came in!, 1954 Cadillac ad from Life magazine
Declaring them the "Greatest" Generation" is an absurd disservice to the men that built America. Built the West, for that matter. Materialist reprobates that raised a generation of lotus eaters in an accountability-free delusion bubble on money stolen from descendants that they would never have to face. They were victims of circumstance, who when given the reigns after the war wholeheartedly embraced vanity, theft, and hypocrisy, and left the most destructive generation in American history as their legacy.
As as for surviving hardships, the survivors of the Black Death had it a tad rougher, but didn't flush their moral and cultural heritage down the toilet for nicer fins on the Caddy. The only people who could look at those idolators and see "greatness" would be the Boomer offspring that that internalized the illusory world of media, materialism, and thoughtless selfishness as a bizarre, soulless faith.
When you're obsessed with novelty, you become cut off from the accumulated wisdom of the past. There may be nothing new under the sun, but circumstances do change and history doesn't always repeat in superficially obvious ways. It echoes. You need to be attentive to deeper patterns to learn from the your forefathers - to see how the things they experienced apply to your own situation. The whole fake ideology of Progress! that defined the modern era - whether the Marxist social version or the consumerist material one - blocks this because newer is better.
1960s fashion ads pulled off the internet.
Novelty as an end in itself is change for the sake of empty display. It turns vanity into a virtue, fosters conspicuous consumption, and the replaces masculine values with homoerotic martinets.
Truth, on the other hand, is constant.
Pythagoras, Ancient Greek Mathematician from the New York Public Library
When Pythagoras came up with his theorem, it was an exciting new breakthrough. Now it's a 2500 year-old cornerstone of basic geometry. And at no point has it stopped being true.
Our ancestors encoded all sorts of practical wisdom in different cultural forms that we stopped paying attention to because they made liars uncomfortable. This is important, because people cut off from knowledge are vulnerable to the things their ancestors warned them about. And that leads to things like countercultures and societal collapse.
Which brings us to the wisdom of fairy tails. There are few holdovers from the past that are more de-moralized than nursery rhymes and fairy tales. Think how often you've heard someone complain about the old stories being too dark, violent, or depressing. But it isn't the stories. What has happened is that the fundamental nature of childhood has changed - for the better in some ways, but disastrously in others.
Greg Olsen, Bedtime Stories, 2012.
Consider the expectations
for a
children's story.
Today, we want it to entertain, perhaps enchant, and ultimately reassure - a safe world of magical adventure where nice people win out and live happily ever after. It is pure escapism within a bubble of childhood innocence that was not available for much of human history, and is good, so long as it doesn't diverge too far from the truth for too long.
Take the Little Mermaid. In the now-iconic Disney version, the protagonist puts desire over reality, contracts with dark forces to achieve them, and nearly kills everyone by empowering the obese witch that "helped" her. But everything works out in the best possible way - she and the prince become soulmates, no lasting harm to any of her relationships, and everyone lives happily every after.
The lesson: want something really badly and no matter what you do to get it, reality will bend to your desire.
Pre-modern children's stories were dark because they couldn't afford a bubble of childhood innocence - people were collectively aware of the threats that faced the naive outside the safety of the home. There is a pattern in most of these stories where someone ignores reality, trusts a stranger, brings and outsider into the home, or dabbles in magic - all things outside the normal social and moral order - and the consequences are terrible. These were hard-earned lessons, and passing them on was a way spare future generations from having to relearn them. To throw away proven truths for empty novelty is demented.
Helen Stratton, The mermaid sisters give the knife to The Little Mermaid, illustration from The Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen, Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1899, p. 139
In Andersen's original, the prince chooses a human bride, and the Mermaid's sisters encourage her to murder the woman. The Mermaid ultimately refuses and dissolves into sea foam, but her willingness to abandon her desires rather than commit the crime wins her the ability to redeem her soul.
The lesson: rejecting reality for impossible relationships, trafficking with dark powers, putting desire above all else are roads to ruin. Go down this path far enough and there are points of no return. But even then, it is never too late to repent and redeem your soul. It may not fire the impossible dreams of 6 year old girls, but it is a far more healthy and practical moral for a child to build their unconscious impressions around.
This isn't a revelation - modern sensibilities often recoil at the violence and perversion suffered by the protagonists, and the harsh punishments for seemingly minor offenses - like the girl in an earlier post on red shoes. This is because the stories weren't meant primarily as escapist entertainment for children. As the title of the The Brothers Grimm's Children’s and Household Tales of 1812 indicates, many weren't aimed at children at all, and all of them instill hard lessons about the nature of the world. Today, our culture allows you to maintain a bubble of childish escapism indefinitely. Everyone has seen the soft, skill-less men is kid's cartoon shirts - products of the globalist debt bubble with a grasp on reality so feeble, it could have come from My Little Pony. The older versions work to disabuse children of dangerous fantasies and equip them for life in reality.
Hans Baldung Grien, The Knight, the Young Girl, and Death, 1505, oil on wood, Musée du Louvre, Paris
Fairy tales seem excessively harsh because they distill the consequences of rejecting reality for vanity into a short, concentrated story that sticks in your memory. This painting is similar - the maiden is swept away with lust for the travelling knight, while the future price is foreshadowed by the skeleton biting her train.
A story like the Little Mermaid or a picture like this distills what is in reality a gradual destruction of the self, and by extension society, into a short, eye-opening message: the wages of sin is death... even if it seems so right at the time. You are responsible for doing what is right.
The Band has identified several toxic tendencies in the modern West, but one we haven't really looked at is the demonization of any form of accountability. Outside of lying parasites blaming Caucasians for mythical grievances to justify more theft. that is. And even that toxic nonsense avoids any individual accountability by assigning blame on the basis of birth. One thing you never hear from the globalist shills and deceivers is personal responsibility for the consequences of one's actions - good or bad. Serial criminals are all victims of circumstance while no entrepreneur really "earned" it. Laws are broken daily by the powerful and diverse alike with utter impunity, institutions fail to provide what they were purposed to do, and our governments continue to spend more than they have on things most don't want.
This is too big an issue to sum up conclusively, so keep it to one pattern.
Hugh Cameron, Homewards With Mother, 19th century, oil on canvas
In one of the Band's early posts on Postmodernism, we distinguished between top-down and bottom-up approaches to things. We were discussing theories of knowledge at the time, but the relationship holds in any number of areas.
Bottom-up approaches are how we actually learn - starting at zero as an infant, then acquiring experiences and information as you grow.
Top-down approaches are imposed on you - when you are told what to believe or think regardless of your empirical observations.
A hypothetical ideal democracy is pure bottom-up politics, since the direction of the collective is guided by the will of the individuals. while an absolute totalitarian state is pure top-down. The reality is always in-between, but there is also always a tendency towards one or the other that we can identify.
Bottom-up morality is inward-directed because it comes from the individual's personal commitment to align with higher truth. The traditional Christian values of the American nation fit here. Top-down morality is externally-driven - a code you are made to observe, whether you believe it or not. Bottom-up hiring would mean choosing the best fit for the present needs, top-down is meeting quotas for any purpose other than maximizing operational efficiency and smoothness.
Hugh Cameron, Playing the Waves, 1901, oil on canvas, private collection
The contemporary "narrative". Note the expressions on the children's faces
These are abstract categories - there is always negotiation between the collective and the individual, but they identify orientations. Bottom-up prioritizes autonomy, personal sovereignty, and judgment within the norms of the national culture. In America, this aligns historically with what is often misleadingly called "freedom". It is more accurate to think of it as favoring individualism when possible.
Top-down systems suppress the individual for collective ideology regardless of truth. The globohomo system, with its protected classes and institutionalized lies and depravity is entirely top down, right down to the 4:00 AM talking points shipped to the Mockingbird media.
Globalism is naked power-seeking, but the ideological cover - the squid ink - is the fake Enlightenment dogma of equalism. The Band has posted a lot about this in the regular posts (click if you are interested for example 1 and example 2) but what is relevant here is the toxic myth that people are interchangeable cogs. In order for an illusion to work, people have to be willing to accept that things that are not true are. Cults work the same way. Believing, or acting as if you believe, or otherwise accepting things that are false, is an important milestone on the way to turning people against themselves and their interests. We all can see that individual people and self-defining groups don't have the same inclinations and capabilities. It is beyond obvious. By impelling society to organize itself as if they do, you get people to consent to their own destruction, virtue signaling all the way.
Thomas Waterman Wood, When We Were Boys Together, 1881, oil on canvas, private collection;
Human cogs from a training site
Bottom up, individually-oriented systems assume personal responsibility to seek the truth. Top down, collective systems couldn't care less about anything, and will sacrifice anyone to their false narratives. Now think about the lack of accountability we see in every institution and organ of this fallen society we live in today. Removing accountability is a war on individual, bottom-up, moral pursuit of Truth because it doesn't matter what you do or are. All that matters is your usefulness to whoever sets the agenda.
Like a blob of sentient protoplasm...
...or a battery in the matrix.
Which brings us back to fairy tales.
The lesson that shines forth in the traditional stories that the world is cruel and that actions have consequences - often far more severe than one might anticipate. This is what reality is like. But it is the message is concentrated into a single, memorable narrative to drive home a point. This aspect is like a fable, only without the moral clearly stated at the end.
LBARRETTillustration, The Tale of the Juniper Tree, 2012, giclée print
It isn't that someone's stepmom is likely to kill them and feed them to their father like in the aptly-named Grimms' "The Juniper Tree". But one only need look at the relative abuse statistics to realize that bringing an outsider into the home exposes children to heightened risk of potentially terrible consequences. And avoiding strangers in the woods was always sound advice.
It's just that in real life, the consequences play out slowly, and can be hard to notice until too late. The story packs the danger of naivete into a single memorable vignette with the worst possible outcome.
So what about the savage punishment for just following your heart or whatever tripe the red shoe salespersons are peddling? In these cases, it's not the specific crime but a self-destructive attitude or pattern of behavior. Deals with dark powers, choosing desire over reality, vanity - immorality in general, really - are roads to ruin. But in real life, they take time to exact their price and can be seductive in the shorter term. The story gives you the whole ruinous arc condensed into a single easy-to-remember story.
William Hogarth, A Harlot's Progress, 1732, set of six untitled prints, this set from the British Museum, London
This was one of Hogarth's "modern moral subjects". It told the story of Moll Hackabout, a country girl who arrives alone in the city, is taken in by a syphilitic procuress - the black spots were applied to cover the sores. A life of prostitution, penury, and early death follow.
Here's the rest of the story:
The story is remarkably applicable to the current day - just think of prostitution and death more generally, as the empty futures of sterile sex and cubicle life that awaits the young dream-followers in the big city.
Moll traffics on her youthful looks, but quickly spirals into ever worse straits as her unnatural lifestyle takes its toll. Sure, there may be some good times in the early going, but the weight of immorality is cumulative.
Hogarth also captures the self-serving uselessness of experts and institutions, likewise a familiar problem. But the sternest lesson comes at the end - Moll dies of syphilis, everyone remains unreflective slaves to their appetites, and her orphan child is ignored. His fate is sealed.
The wages of sin cross generations.
A fairy tale takes relatively lengthy process of being destroyed by immorality, like the stages in the Hogarth engravings, and condenses it into a single, concentrated tale. The plots may be windows into the weirdness of the past, but they also drive home riveting lessons on personal moral accountability - the need to protect yourself, and how seemingly cruel and unfair the consequences when someone doesn't. Bitter fruit can come from tiny seeds. This is not a message with legs in our modern zero-accountability official culture. So we get the pedo-friendly Disney versions, where the children know best, and selfish vanity the ticket to eternal happiness. Oh, and your culture is stupid, strangers are wise, and children have nothing to fear from social outcasts. Because dreams, or something.
Like the absurd father-daughter relationship in Beauty and the Beast. The ineffectual inventor stumped by problems that his daughter can see through at a glance. The same daughter who he neglects to the predatory advances of the town psychopath and encourages to wander wide-eyed into strange situations alone. He is even drawn in a ridiculous way compared to the others. In contrast, Belle is smart, wise, good, brave and caring - traits she couldn't have picked up from her self-absorbed idiot father.
If kids don't learn virtue from family, it must come from that never-fail magic of children's dreams.
Just pay no mind to the headlines...
... or whose dreams.
The other dodge are the half-assed attempts to find "the real story" by explaining away the "fantastical" elements and removing any moral lesson in the process. Which may be intentional - without the concentrated message of immorality and terrible consequences, there's no reason to think about the wages of sin being death. It's as if modern culture is incapable of of even presenting the idea of responsibility or accountability. Like a demon choking on the truth.
Which bring us to the Pied Piper of Hamlin. The magic stranger who is stiffed after ridding the town of rats and returns to steal the children is exactly the sort of weird story of horrific vengeance that we've been talking about. Right down to modern interpreters emphasizing the de-moralized "true story" and ignoring the moral lesson in accountability that it provides. Not surprisingly, the message has little to do with what "really happened" in 1284 and everything to do with the larger patterns.
Gruss aus Hameln, postcard featuring the Pied Piper, 1902
A standard representation of the Piper and his magical ability to charm the rats.
On the surface, the story is ridiculous - in real life, the Piper would have been riddled with arrows before he got 20 feet. If it was based on real events, it has changed them so much that they are unrecognizable in it. This hasn't stopped people from fixating on what "really happened" despite the impossibility of ever resolving the question (two examples: click, click). What the unreal aspects tell us is that recording some snippet of history isn't the point - if it was, obviously magical additions wouldn't be at the center. The magic isn't superfluous, it's the tell - the story has a magical dimension that tells us the meaning is more symbolic. Forget the mysteries of history and think in terms of accountability and responsibility. Then look closely at the details.
Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Reading the Bible, 1755, oil on canvas, Louvre Museum, Paris
Note on the interpretation. These stories come from the pre-modern era, meaning people experienced them differently from today. Imagine life revolving around the home, only a home with virtually none of the individualized media and entertainment that atomizes us before absorbing us into huge, impersonal collective virtual "communities".
There were also far fewer stories and scenes in total. Stories were shared, discussed, often read aloud. The idea that memorable narrative imagery and moral or social meaning were packed into a single simple tale wasn't odd - it was the norm in that environment. The kind of instruction that went back to the Biblical parables and folktales that gave homes a moral foundation and taught children to read.
Start with the most basic message - the cautionary tale that when you don't pay your debts - when you steal the work or things of others, you lose your children.
This is consistent with Shakespeare's paraphrase of Scripture that the sins of the father are to be laid upon the children (The Merchant of Venice, III, v.) and the Biblical warning that the wages of sin is death (Romans, 6:23). Put aside red herrings like what really happened or whether the punishment fits the details of the crime by modern legal standards and pay attention to what the story actually says.
As noted, materialists are always looking to "explain away" things by ignoring - not addressing, ignoring - central details, or focusing on "origins" that are different in critical ways. Calling the Pied Piper an unreasonable distortion of some murky historical event makes the story into irrational "folklore", and any message is waved away for modern leftist globalist sensibilities. If primitive people bungle their own history, soy creatures can feel superior in their decaying materialist "paradise". Notice that whether the stories are sanitized or "explained", eliminating personal accountability is a constant. The modern reader feels superior simply because they've grown up in a declining illusory culture with escalating debt as a hedge against responsibility. Rather than face the message, they turn the story into something it isn't and talk about that.
The Band takes the opposite approach.
What do the accountability-averse not want to consider? Do the math:
the sins of the fathers are to be laid
upon the children
+
the wages of sin is death
=
accountability across generations in families and communities
Or precisely the opposite of the atomized, narrative-dependent protoplasm of globohomo. It's worth spelling out.
Vintage Pied Piper postcards
In a simple fable like the Pied Piper, the literal and allegorical parts aren't subtly woven together. It's easy to tell when you are crossing from "realistic" narrative into something more figurative because things get too unrealistic.
The assymmetric punishment and unbelievable kidnapping - this is objectively not what happens when a contractor gets ripped off. It isn't telling what will happen to a specific thief - it's more general.
Chris Rawlins, The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Likewise the magic pipes - whatever happened in real life, it wasn't an actual magician leading away a crowd with an enchanted instrument. It's too fantastical to be considered practical advice for any specific scenario - it's more general.
So think general - wages of sin and sins of the father - we need to identify the nature of the sin and its consequences compressed into this one memorable story.
There are actually two transgressions here - cheating the piper and neglecting responsibility for personal desire. Theft and vanity. This is getting interesting.
Consider the set-up. The town is infested by rats to the point where it has become intolerable. Sort of like a medieval Baltimore. Rats have always been a problem, but this level is atypical. It is indicative of people who are slovenly and/or turn a blind eye to incremental problems until they reach a crisis point. Sort of like the "urban" political establishment.
Lazy self-obsession.
The solution - grab for a magical quick fix - is typical of these sorts of people. Make up words like "racist" or contract a wizard to make the problems go away with essentially an illusion - the rats are spellbound into walking to their demise - in exchange for future payment. But by providing the service, the piper has placed the townspeople in debt. A debt they fully agreed to.
The theft occurs when they refuse to make good on it.
The whole plot structure is organized around avoiding accountability. And even then, they remain so self-absorbed that the same magic robs them of their children underneath their noses.
Interesting has become hauntingly familiar.
The sin is compound. Seeking a quick fix for the fruits of indolence and self-indulgence with entertaining illusions bought on credit with no intention to repay. Like modern America, they sold their future - their children - for debt-theft fueled material gratification now. Fins on the Caddy. Lollipops and fancy pants. Something for nothing.
Not only is it not "excessive" that the story ends with this protoplasm burning their children on the altar of their vanity, it's the lesson.
Elizabeth Forbes, The Pied Piper of Hamelin, around 1900, pastel, Penlee House Gallery and Museum, Cornwall
No one was there when the music took the kids away.
Now, how does the piper work his magic? We'll stick to general lessons, because the literal meaning - real sorcery - is too fantastical to be a realistic and indicates a more figurative meaning. And this is where we'll find the lesson about the power of music.
The Band works with words and pictures, generally speaking, and we've given a lot of consideration to how they present information. But we haven't really looked at music beyond the basic mathematical relationships expressed in the harmonic scale. This is mainly because music communicates in a very different way. It is neither mimetic - representing of the visual appearance of something - like a picture, nor discursive - systematic presentations of narrowly-defined symbols - like writing or diagrams. It is immaterial, passes through time, and operates on the emotions in the most personal way. It is the most abstract form of communication.
Consider the meaning of abstract.
There are several definitions, but they all involve moving from the specific to the more general or impersonal. To abstract something is to remove it from a particular context and treat it as its own subject.
Pablo Picasso, Landscape with Two Figures, 1908, oil on canvas, 60 x 73 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris.
In art, abstraction simplifies to showcase some underlying aspect of the picture. Picasso's landscape is abstract because he is breaking a complex scene into simple forms to showcase that paintings are artificial arrangements.
Mark Rothko, N°21 (Red, Brown, Black and Orange), 1953 , oil on canvas.
Rothko's abstraction is extreme - reducing painting down to fundamentals of color which become the subjects. He saw his colors like a sort of music, carefully arranged in tone, texture, and contrast to induce different moods. That's not the mood that comes when you hear that this recently
Here's someone writing a lot of words in a futile attempt to give this substance. This is precisely how modern art "discourse" works.
Abstract and mimetic paintings create different relationships with the audience. A mimetic scene is very specific. It may create a feeling or trigger memories, but it starts with a fixed image. Every viewer will interpret it differently, but you are all starting with the same particular visual impression. Abstraction takes the specific details away to convey something more general, and therefore more open to interpretation. In the Picasso, it is the formal and physical realities of painting. For Rothko, it is the emotional effect of color. Abstracting color out of painting lets him present this without the distraction of a scene to get in the way. The notion is that if he doesn't show or tell you anything, the picture gives you nothing concrete to think about and opens a clear path to the emotions.
Think about this from the perspective of the audience. You're given an emotional stimulus with nothing concrete to think about. But virtually no one looks at a painting and thinks about nothing. If it works as intended, all it can do is trigger personal thoughts and recollections that are consistent with the mood it creates.
From the perspective of the artist, mimetic art is more specific in subject matter - depicting identifiable places or things - while abstract art is more general. This relationship reverses when it comes to the effect on the audience. Keep in mind that this is relative - all response is subjective, the question is to what extent and what goal the artist is striving for.
Joshua Reynolds, Portrait of Anthony Chamier, 1767, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
A traditional portrait is very specific in subject matter. The quality is judged by the accuracy of the likeness, and other features provide information about the sitter. It is highly personalized.
Audience response is the opposite. Obviously there is no way to control what everyone thinks about when they see a picture, but you can be sure that everyone is responding to the same face. The responses will differ, but they all start by visualizing the person that the artist is showing you.
And if someone asks afterwards to recall the face you were thinking about when you saw the picture, it will be an imperfect memory of this person.
Constantin Brancusi, Mademoiselle Pogany [I], 1912, marble on limestone block, Philadelphia Museum of Art
An abstract portrait is very general in subject matter. The quality is irrelevant because the point is to destroy ideas of artistic skill, so nothing is conveyed about any particular subject . It is highly generalized.
Audience response is the opposite. If you call an actual face to mind, it won't be a "sitter", so everyone's thoughts don't start with the same guy. If you think of a real or fictional person, it isn't likeness shown in the artwork. It will be something drawn from you personal memory or experiences.
And if someone asks afterwards to recall the face you were thinking about when you saw the picture, the responses will be highly individualized.
The more abstract the picture, the more personalized the response.
Words are more abstract than pictures in a related way in that they reduce the complexity of human experience to permutations of the same set of graphemes. Say the word "landscape", and everyone pictures a different scene. But words are discursive. They can be compounded endlessly into increasingly detailed descriptions able to preserve and communicate extremely complicated ideas and stories. They can't show you exactly what something looks like, but they can provide unlimited characteristics to think about.
Example - look at the picture and we all see the same thing. Read "sunny forest" and you will all picture a different scene. But you can bring the audience's mental imagery closer to the picture with layers of description. The response will never be as universal as to the picture, but the more you describe it, the more you shape what the minds' eyes are envisioning.
Now imagine trying to make someone see this exact image with music.
Music is not mimetic like a picture or discursive like words. It isn't visible and isn't made up of distinct lexical symbols. It doesn't show or describe anything physically specific - nothing in particular is imposed from the outside. We're setting aside titles - they use words to precondition your impressions - and lyrics, which are text, for clarity. Music bypasses discursive messages or mimetic visuals for direct, unfiltered appeal to the emotions, or what the Greeks called pathos. It can create primally powerful feelings that can in turn trigger the deepest thoughts and recollections. It doesn't present facts to think about, it changes your entire state of mind. It's why it's called "evocative".
But what it evokes is intensely personal. Without something concrete to think about, the listener provides their own thoughts. Whatever mood or memory that the music calls to mine.
The most abstract medium, the most individualized response.
Music is so powerful because it is abstract - it makes you feel without linking those feelings to anything you can see or read. It is pure rhetoric - creating emotions without persuading or convincing you of anything because it doesn't communicate anything. If the music moves you, you provide the narratives, associations, and reasons that give it meaning.
You can even combine it with discursive or mimetic media to add emotional content to whatever you are being shown and told. This makes multi-media presentations like movies and television so seductive - the musical component is a direct, rhetorical path to your feelings operating underneath whatever message you think you are seeing/hearing.
Footloose is a good example - a terribly-acted bit of anti-Christian nonsense that rang false when it came out. Imagine this movie without the 8 times platinum Billboard #1 soundtrack with two number one hits, another in the top 10, and three more top 40.
Pop lyrics can be tricky - some are like poetry, but songs like these fall somewhere between text and music - they're words, but often incoherent and chosen for their sound more than meaning. "Maybe he's no Romeo, but he's my loving one-man show" sang Deniece Williams - syllables and cadence that lead into the bridge musically, but are pretty vacuous as a message.
Now consider how these types of communication, with their different relationships to reason and emotion, relate to desire. Simplify, or abstract, for the sake of discussion, and we can make two overlapping groups: rational and irrational desires.
Jack Sorenson, The Homecoming, 2016
Rational desires are things that logically serve the big picture interests of the individual or the group. Following them tends to lead to positive long-term outcomes.
Frans Francken, A Voluptuary Surprised by Death, early 17th century, oil on wood, Wellcome Collection, London
Irrational desires are the usual vanities - putting short term whims and pleasures ahead of the true/good and long-term benefit - and tend to be impulsive. No reflection, just the Satanic do what thou wilt to feed your appetites.
Superimpose this on our forms of communication, and we can say rational desires tend to be complex in logical structure. You have to weigh costs, consider possibilities, and balance outcomes in ways that curb the tendency to act on impulsive feelings. This is rational thinking - the sort of process best communicated in words, though pictures are good at showing consequences.
Irrational desires are driven by feelings and are indifferent to logical analysis.
Kate Greenaway, frontispiece to Robert Browning's The Pied Piper of Hamelin, 1889 edition, engraved by Edmund Evans
Any form of communication can trigger an appetite by association, but the magic of music allows it to create pure longing - powerful emotions without any mimetic or discursive content to distract from the feeling. Desire that you will then provide with personal narrative to justify feeling and acting it out in real life. If the music is strong enough, it can overwhelm rational thought, and if it is appealing, those emotions draw the listener to it. In the piper's case, the emotional pull of the music marches the rats then the children to their end.
The contrast between childhood innocence and the Satanic musician in perverse. And foreshadowing.
Now look at the Pied Piper himself. There are a lot of pictures of the character in this post, and all of them look different. Fairy tales are pretty abstract - to give more space for you to personalize the story and internalize the message. The only hard information we have about the piper's appearance is the adjective in his name, leaving artists free to envision him as they like, so long as he is "pied".
This calls for the 1828 Websters.
Pied is a word that shares etymological roots with magpie and piebald and refers to a patchy appearance of two or more colors. The piper's costume is unusually colored, especially in comparison to the simple dress of the average medieval villager. It isn't just his music that weaves his spell - his striking coloration makes his movements entrancing in a hypnotic way.
Artists have imagined him in lots of different ways, from wizard to raggedy man, but almost always colorful, as in these pictures pulled from an internet search.
He's often shown as a colorful generic medieval jester-minstral-fool type. Red and yellow are a common color scheme, but there's no rule.
There are a couple of occult echos in this figure.
The magical piper making enchanting music outside the limits of civilization goes back to pagan antiquity and the rustic goat-god Pan. This has it's own long occult history, with the savage passions of Pan representing the turn away from spirit and intellect to wallow in animalistic appetites and irrational desires. Do what thou wilt without consideration for the long-term interests, either for you or those close to you. Something to look closer at down the road.
Pan and Daphnis, Roman copy of a Greek original of arounf 100 BC, marble, Naples Museum of Archeology
Justin Todd, The Wind in the Willows Pan, illustration for Kenneth Grahame's The Wind In The Willows, 1987, reprinted 2013
Pink Floyd, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, 1967, EMI Columbia
For now, we'll just point out that this become explicitly psychedelic when Pink Floyd took the animal god version of Pan in Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows as the title of their debut album in 1967. Of all the images to choose, they opt for talking animals' mystical encounter with a beast-god.
The pied costuming is a nice touch - only the modern Piper's "magic" is acid and atavism. Here's a shill with the typical nonsense about acid and atavism mattering. You can't push cultural destruction without a cadre of paid liars to push it as cool, and it's best when the liars are sufficiently stupid and ignorant to actually believe the lies. Literal useful idiots.
Then there's the occult tarot, with colorful images and promises of revelation that're catnip for low-energy "seekers".
Pamela Colman Smith, The Fool, for the Rider-Waite tarot deck, published 1909
Tarot has medieval roots, but the Rider-Waite deck is the best known of the versions designed for cartomancy or occult readings. The Fool represents optimism and new beginnings, but associated with the spiritual seeker or initiate in the occult tarot (link to an "information" dump on the occult Fool, if the background interests you. But it isn't coherent).
It isn't the specific details that matter as much as the image of the magical man of many colors who can ensorcel away the future with music and spectacle.
Grateful Dead, Grateful Dead, 1967, Warner Bros.
Coming back to the acid tests, we see the lessons of the Pied Piper cast aside for exactly the same inducements - bright colors and long musical journeys to nowhere. Unfortunately the acid tests were real life and there are no fantastical elements. The allure of the Piper's performance was magically enhanced because a magical shortcut is necessary to condense the long self-destruction of a life of sin into a single memorable narrative. So the acid tests had to rely on more worldly forms of "enhancement".
Acid Test Graduation photo; Further bus from an earlier post.
There was the "cool" factor of bailing on comfortable orderly communities to wallow in filth and intoxication. We can see this in the gushing accounts of idiot attendees.
The performances didn't even have to be any good, because the intoxicated filth wallowing was so awesome and important qua intoxicated filth wallowing.
And then there was the acid. The Band started this look into the psychedelic occult with a couple of posts on the effects of LSD and the mythology around it to deal with the reality of the chemical vs. the retarded claims about it made by animalistic hedonists. So that when we see it held up as either a gateway to higher conscious or an agent of social transformation, we know that we are dealing with bullshitting protoplasm that will shamelessly lie to further their sociopathic desires.
Kesey's Trips Festival was the evolution of the Acid Test into something closer to a multi-media rock show, with lighting and content oriented to people tripping on LSD.
The reality is that the mind-altering effects of the acid plus the "cool" factor of the scene takes the place of the Piper's magic and amplifies the self-destructive siren call of the music to an irresistible pull.
And no one was there when the music took the kids away.
The "Greatest". This is long enough for an occult post. Next time we'll look more closely at Kesey's greatful pipers and the connections between their brand of musical formlessness, the psychedelic, and the occult.
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