Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

[araucaria]

Some anomalies in the Miles Mathis material: an alternative picture

This thread is not an offshoot of Paul’s thread (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94363-The-physics-of-atomic-nuclei-chemical-bonding-light-gravity-electromagnetics--Miles-Mathis-&p=1111489&viewfull=1#post1111489). I started collating material for this thread back in October; but before I come to that, I need to deal with some unfinished business on the other thread from which I withdrew after Paul described my remarks as ‘slanderous’. Rest assured: I am not going to indulge in any sort of polemicking; what I am about to say is theoretical in nature and will segue, slowly but neatly, into the meat of this thread. Since part of the problem seems to have been not disposing of the entirety of my thinking, it may be a good idea to hear me out before commenting further. It will take around a dozen posts for me to cover that ground. Preparing these posts – and finding much more than even I bargained for – is what has made this cooling-off period so long. The entire dozen is now ready for posting, maybe not at four-minute intervals, but fairly rapidly. Others posters will of course do as they please, but I may not respond until the end of what is to me a single mammoth post divided up for convenience.

A major difficulty always is getting the literate turn of mind to converse with the numerate turn of mind, even within a single brain. My constant focus is on achieving this in some small measure while also pointing out how it can sometimes work. We are dealing in this instance with a spectacular failure: no big deal. My thanks to all in the other thread for your support and to anyone patient enough to read this one.


Glad you’re hanging around
Paula, I didn’t say I wasn’t withdrawing from the forum: more like hanging by a thread... I am in a kind of NDE state, meaning that I can slip either way and either is good. My membership is precious, but not so precious or addictive I cannot give it up. I have no website: I could easily start one. However, the vast canvas of Avalon provides the area of freedom of expression one needs in order to operate... freely. That does not and should not involve slander, and I think it is worth taking a little time to explain why, for the benefit of others in my position who may be unable or unwilling to defend themselves. It doesn’t matter how carefully one writes, misunderstandings are always possible, and it is worth the time and effort to take a closer look. If you want to understand how I am not just talking about ‘withdrawal symptoms’, then I’m afraid you are going to have to read all the way through to my conclusion :)

I mentioned Shane because it was Paul who introduced his material here and was big enough to deal with the situation when it was shown his first impression was spectacularly wrong. He has often referred wryly to his past mistakes, e.g. re 911, and is to be highly commended for his honesty and open-mindedness. I would suggest that the initial enthusiasm and the final disappointment go hand in hand. In the end it was I who was pointing out how Shane was not the total fraud he had become for others by that time, and I could do so because from the start I had seen a fictional element in his writings: not truth, not deception, something else. I said I hadn’t changed since then. I feel something similar is going on here. When I see an OP listing scientists studied and somehow found wanting, then going a little over the top about Miles Mathis, I see a search for a ‘theory of everything’ and a cause for further disappointment. No one person can provide more than they have: science, like any human endeavour, is a collective enterprise. Mathis’s cursory dismissal of Rupert Sheldrake as a fraud simply because he appears on TV immediately betrays a similar black-and-white go-it-alone attitude that I personally am not going to call slanderous; but it is certainly accusatory, exclusive and competitive (antagonistic) – one can see straight off that any such overall theory will include everything but Rupert Sheldrake (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?67668-Courtney-Brown-Announcement-for-February--now-March--2014&p=800846&viewfull=1#post800846) and a few others. The biggest picture will always be a mere part of an even larger puzzle, so if it is closure you want, the only type of closure you are going to get is on... closure itself. You can find the Holy Grail, but until you work out what it is supposed to contain, you are in possession of an empty vessel, of the sort that typically makes the most noise. (I have a good example of that later on in the shape of an empty biscuit tin :))

So I was not slandering Mathis by having lower expectations of him: I was upsetting Paul, who takes it almost personally, and I’m sorry for that, because it was not my intention at all to upset Paul. How this happened is likely due to the above-mentioned circumstance. I started collating material for a Miles Mathis thread of my own (this one) back in October. I put it on the back burner when I got involved in a difficult election discussion with Paul. Flash (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94363-The-physics-of-atomic-nuclei-chemical-bonding-light-gravity-electromagnetics--Miles-Mathis-&p=1111819&viewfull=1#post1111819), you are right: early November was a difficult time for Americans in particular, and when you say ‘This propagandist crooked election takes a hold on all of them’, that is something I was trying to point out in a series of posts such as this one (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94213-The-Evil-Empire-is-being-destroyed&p=1110947&viewfull=1#post1110947). Fortunately, outside circumstances as well as intellectual rigour – and also this odd psychic reticence that occasionally kicks in when tackling sensitive issues – have forced me to take my time over posting this thread.

Then Paul started his Miles Mathis thread and I waded in somewhat on a tangent, which was a mistake on my part – I sincerely apologize – but maybe not entirely a mistake, because the material I have to share below is more disturbing than what I have indicated so far. I made the valid, undisputed point that a 2-million word data dump could not expect same-day appraisal. There is a housekeeping issue here: when one starts a thread on a subject such as numerous Mathis science papers, there is an immediacy trap (which I fell into) in that this is not the most suitable medium for saying, Come back in three years’ time when you are fully up to speed. It is the ultimate conversation stopper when you are trying to have a discussion on a forum. But that is only a trap if one takes the view that a full understanding of anything is required before expressing a provisional impression short of an opinion. Since the world is drowning in information overload, that is clearly not an option, at least most of the time. I would suggest that we receive information through the filter of our personal knowledge base, i.e. matters that we are more or less thoroughly familiar with. The general issue then becomes improving the quality of that filter – through practice.

Applying my filter to Mathis, I may be on a tangent, and I may not be entirely up to speed, but if he has already awakened wariness in this reader, that unfavourable impression is entirely his own doing and worth pointing out to others. Let me restate how I see his art relating to his science. Either they are in some way a match, or they are a mismatch, whether through competence in one area and incompetence in the other, or a lack of integration, as opposed to integrity – not a moral failing, simply a lack of unification, an internal inconsistency if you will: no hanging matter. Are then these two aspects perhaps somehow reconciled in the intermediate conspiracy research Mathis also engages in, and which I came to first?

Here ends my opening statement. My next post will look at Mathis’s work on allegedly fake deaths.

[araucaria]

My first introduction to Miles Mathis was here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?81124-Miles-W.-Mathis-Theories-about-Engineered-Events-in-History&p=947668&viewfull=1#post947668). The idea for this thread came to me on discovering the entire John Lennon thread after it was revived on 18 October (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?85638-I-Was-There-...-Imagine-John-Lennon-Isn-t-Dead-&p=1106678&viewfull=1#post1106678) last.
Regarding Mathis’s work on fake deaths, above and beyond the apparently cogent narrative relating to individual events such as the Sharon Tate murders (professional actors maybe doing some professional acting), I was troubled by the basic counterintuitive premise that ‘no one ever gets killed’. Most alternative investigation on the contrary involves adding to the huge body count: the elite supposedly has this agenda of removing all but 500 million of us. No doubt fake deaths do occur from time to time; when they do, at least you will know it was not the Clintons :) – they like their victims very dead indeed, ‘beastly dead’ (Joyce, Ulysses). The Hillary Clinton election saga actually puts this whole process into reverse: the reality, or unreality, of the situation appears to be that the real Clinton is seriously ill/dying/already dead, with a body double pretending otherwise. So my first impression is that this conspiracy researcher is overplaying his hand, almost turning his material (true or false, I don’t know and can’t tell) into... disinformation. If I were to turn nasty, I might suggest that Mathis sees Intelligence assets everywhere because he is one himself. But I intend to keep this polite, and am content to say that while others may do as they please, I take this material with a generous pinch of salt. That is to say, I don’t need to have an opinion either way. It may be of help to others to explain why I feel comfortable with that neutrality: it serves as catalyst for my own thinking process, and for that I can only be grateful.

That is all I have to say about the fake death analyses with respect to conspiracy research. I turn now to how they may relate to Miles Mathis’s work as an artist – both art and writing. When I saw a thread about John Lennon not being dead after all, I knew it had to be Mathis: that is what he does. Artists have a way of picking up a ball and running with it – if ever you hear that Christo is working on the White House, you know it will be to wrap it up. Or Daniel Buren will put his famous thin stripes on everything. Similarly, if you heard that Miles Mathis was working on Princess Diana, you would know it would be to show she never died. These guys have a hammer and everything they take their hammer to becomes a nail, although it might actually be a screw, a bolt, a peg, a pin or whatever. But there is a positive side to this process: it is not about ‘true’ nails and ‘false’ nails, but about ‘nailness’. To know what a nail is, you need to know what it isn’t. As Picasso said in 1935, ‘the value of a work [of art] resides precisely in what it is not.’

When Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag building (http://christojeanneclaude.net/mobile/projects?p=wrapped-reichstag), what did they do? They took their hammer – a few acres of tarpaulin and a few miles of rope – and buried their nail – the building. What happened next I can only surmise. For a period of time, people would walk past this building, trying to match their present limited perceptions with their recollections. They might find a resemblance to the Louvre, Buckingham Palace, or if they were feeling ‘slanderous’, to an ordinary office block, or even an iceberg. In other words, the specific nail was turned into a fuzzy set comprising nail/screw/bolt/peg/pin... (akin to a particle behaving like a wave). The interesting part comes when the covers were taken off. No, the building hadn’t morphed into the Louvre (although that was always one possibility!): it had collapsed back into the Reichstag building; but not the old building, surely a new one seen with the sharpened vision that comes from confronting plain sight with error-prone memory feeding on the misperceptions of everyday familiarity.

In other words, we learn what a nail is by comparing it with other similar items. A screw serves basically the same purpose, but you can see from the penetrative spiral that it really requires a rotary force from a screw-driver. A bolt has a concentric spiral with no point that calls for a hole to be drilled. And a nail having just the sharp end can just be hammered in – as can the others, only not so easily. Similarly art is always a part of art history: the collective of other artworks known to the artist at the time. Hence the architecture in a Christo art wrapping is always both what it is (a particular building, independent of people’s recollection of it) and what it isn’t (other buildings, or the same building misremembered). It doesn’t become a fake, it becomes a fiction, while the underlying reality remains unchanged.

[araucaria]

Take another example: The Family Reunion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bazille#/media/File:Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bazille_001.jpg)by Frédéric Bazille, a painter I previously mentioned here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?93755-Multi-dimensionality-lecture&p=1105090&viewfull=1#post1105090). This was the first ever group portrait painted entirely outdoors, and why that is important will be apparent in a moment. Bazille portrays his family, including his mother featured prominently in a deep blue dress, and two cousins in whitish dresses. The real dresses were both white (we have their owners’ testimony), but the viewer sees them as different shades of light blue: that is the colour of the paint on the canvas. This difference is not fact vs fiction: it is a record of what the artist actually saw: due to their proximity to the patch of deep blue, the two dresses would take on a bluish hue, paler further away, more pronounced closer in (I owe this insight to a museum guide). Had there been just one cousin, her dress would have just seemed bluish; but the presence of the two hints at this at the time unfamiliar visual effect, derived from two conflicting facts: the objective fact (the white dress), and the optical illusion, itself an objective fact because anyone can and will see it.

The only way for the painter to study and depict this effect was through having all his models together for the duration of the entire process, i.e. a number of days, something they found excruciatingly boring – although in the meantime no doubt plenty of conversation went on. In other words, this is a real family reunion as it actually happened, as opposed to conventional methods, which would involve making sketches (drawings and oils), mostly one person at a time, and assembling the final composition in the studio. Had that been the method, those dresses would have been plain white. Painters like Bazille most of the time could not afford even one model, so they resorted to painting flowers, themselves, each other, their (each other’s) girlfriends, their studios (including painting their paintings), or dead fish and game birds borrowed from the local fishmonger or butcher. This real-life constraint massively overcome by the real-life family willing to endure this chore explains the novelty of the piece. Hence the blue is a measure of the human bond on the female side, and the completed picture is testimony to the family bond holding them all together. No man is an island. One begins to understand the complexity involved in representing reality in a given medium – here what colour to paint the white dress: blue is ‘truer’ than white.

This is an original observation of how we actually see things, and there is really nothing counter-intuitive to it. If you see a crow on pristine snow at dead of night, you will just see uniform black. Does that mean snow is sometimes black? No... Your new dress will appear white in the bright strip lighting of the store, but when you get it home it will look different in different contexts. What colour is the dress? It all depends. Someone will look like their Dad, or like your Dad, or your Dad will suddenly look like he never did before: the information lies in the discrepancy between expectation and actual perception, between similarities and differences. White can be anything from pure white to pitch black, and is usually somewhere in between.

This has everyday applications. Take the difference between a chair and a table. In the dictionary, and not unimportantly, in polite society, one is strictly for sitting on, the other for sitting at. But of course, in normal situations, there is a degree of overlap: with minimum fuss, you can sit on a table, or you can sit at a chair with a plate of food on it; but in polite society this would be met with shock. This is no small deal. Take it all the way up: for a controlling group, humanity belongs strictly to the sitting-on category (not couch potatoes: couches!), and decidedly not the sitting-at category where business is ‘on the table’ for discussion. Adaptability and casual making do with approximations (making the best of a bad job) are very alien human qualities for these people: not qualities at all in fact, just sloppiness or even slovenliness. Qualities and defects, as is well known, are often two sides of the same coin.

This has scientific applications: not only is white a combination of all colours separatable through a prism, the above examples are artistic versions of the Schrodinger’s cat experiment. I speculate here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?91692-Soft-underbellies&p=1079888&viewfull=1#post1079888)on how we might see a whole array of potential outcomes for that experiment, not just black/white, dead or alive. (As a sidenote, Mathis also has a chapter on this experiment I have only glanced at).

It also has political and moral applications. Just as Manet’s deepest black is never black (I once scanned reproductions of his deep blacks and discovered not a single pixel of black in the jpeg file), Monet’s snow is never pure white. This inevitably drifts into moral and political issues. See here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?93755-Multi-dimensionality-lecture&p=1105090&viewfull=1#post1105090). Seen in the sharp bright spotlight of the mainstream media, Hillary Clinton can appear as the representative of womanhood and all that is feminine, while Trump is cast in the deep shadow of that spotlight to the point that his dark side is all we see. And vice versa. But snow really is white and a crow really is black. You need to increase and equalize the light to tell which is which and distinguish fifty shades of grey in between.

[araucaria]

Lastly, the above has applications for the specific case of Miles Mathis. I have outlined above how certain deceptively simple operations lead to individual complexity within a collective. This would be my personal platform. However, in everyday parlance, the notion of having only a hammer and seeing every issue as a nail is the very reverse of that. It is my contention that – at least in ‘The Stolen Century’, the document I shall be looking at – Mathis falls into this more conventional category. When they come into contact with an Intelligence operative (the hammer), fully rounded characters become flattened into their docile, mercenary puppets, cardboard cutouts with no mind of their own. Cardboard cutouts do not ‘die’: only flesh-and-bloods humans do that. When this one-dimensional treatment is applied to the likes of Ezra Pound or James Joyce, it is patent nonsense. It would seem that Pound and Joyce are stepping-stones from modern art, which Mathis doesn’t like, to Ernest Hemingway, whom he doesn’t like – stepping-stones across a river subject to flash flooding. He is clearly out of his depth.

Exactly how far what I have to say is applicable to Miles Mathis’ other work remains to be seen, but it is consistent with his artistic practice. Looking at his pictures (I haven’t studied his art criticism so far), here’s the deal. He acts as though the twentieth century never happened. Although Mathis is correct in saying that much art (and literature) has lost its way, blanket rejection (blanket anything) is evidently not the answer, since it leads him to some obvious mistakes (see below). Does his rejection of Modernism make him an artist of our time, a 21st century artist? No: in terms of technique, he is a late nineteenth century artist. My grandparents, who have been dead these last sixty years, might have enjoyed his work (http://mileswmathis.com/thumbs5.html) when they were young, although they might have balked at Cézanne or Van Gogh. A 21st century artist will have digested the twentieth century not as something monolithic to be vomited en bloc, but by assimilating the useful and eliminating the rest. I fear Mathis has thrown the baby out with the bath water. He is an excellent commercial artist; this is not meant pejoratively: he surely gives great pleasure to many; but it is not ground-breaking art. Making an honest living is not a good basis for accusing others of selling out on their art; you would need to be a non-commercial artist to do that.

His art then is consistent with his writing; in ‘The Stolen Century’ – which as the filename papa.pdf indicates, is primarily a piece against Ernest ‘Papa’ Hemingway – he denounces Modernism as a deliberate sabotage of true art. I am not contesting the basic premise of infiltration of art circles. I might even add to his information by quoting Stealing Van Gogh (2015), in which Robert C. Williams sets out the details of MoMa (the New York Museum of Modern Art) as a CIA/Rockefeller operation. But I have a big objection when Mathis writes,

I have now compiled enough evidence to indicate that these Modernist salons in London and Paris were manufactured or infiltrated by Intelligence, which means that most or all of the artists promoted by them—including my original target Hemingway—were also manufactured.Setting aside the issue of the weight of his evidence, we see some serious logical slippage here, and not just from artists to writers: from ‘manufactured or infiltrated’, we slip to ‘were also manufactured’; and the grapeshot aimed at the ‘original target Hemingway’ spreads to ‘most or all of the artists’, meaning, one supposes, all rather than most. The alleged method is blatant: infection (infiltration) leading to overall contamination. However, it coincides perfectly with the investigative method itself, involving clicking on successive Wikipedia links to string people together. Mathis is perfectly upfront with his ‘red string’ or ‘skeleton key’ method. Since he also admits to using it for his science, and confesses that it runs away with him – in other words it is out of control, controlling him – this places a huge question mark over everything he writes, including his science, even before examining the details. I am reminded of the climatologist Michael Mann’s infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph (http://a-sceptical-mind.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-hockey-stick) indicating uncontrollable global warming and produced with an algorithm capable of generating nothing but hockey sticks.

Those who have traveled over to my science site will know that my discovery of the charge field has
allowed me to unravel a remarkable number of mysteries in a short time. I have called it the key to
every door. Well, I have recently found a similar sort of skeleton key for the mysteries outside of
physics. Although my discovery in physics contained a bit of method along with my usual serendipity,
I have to admit that here the method was almost entirely lacking. Either I was very lucky or someone
fed me the information: there is no other way to explain it. During a break from my physics papers, I
was just following my nose on some non-scientific topics. Somehow I came up with a paper on
Theosophy and the Beat Generation, and although that was only a couple of weeks ago, I couldn't tell
you how or why I hit on those subjects to write about. It dropped into my lap, so to speak. I think
someone mentioned Theosophy to me, I realized I didn't know much about it, and I began researching
it. In that research, I saw a red string and I began to pull on it. It unraveled and unraveled, and before I
knew it the whole cloak had turned to a pile of yarn. The red string trailed off into another room, I
entered that room, and again all the garments and curtains and rugs unraveled. I have been following
that red string ever since. ‘Either I was very lucky or someone fed me the information’. Well, precisely. And he thought he was doing science... This last is more commonly known as channelling, and on this website at least, the practice very properly does not meet with the Avalon administration’s approval. Maybe some of his science does fly; some of it probably does. That is not my point. My point is that it is self-avowedly only a little more methodical than the self-avowed baseline serendipity being exposed in this thread. Let me just state at this point with regard to myself that there is no one feeding information to me: this has been hard graft all the way. Maybe I’m just not very lucky, but I do try to be methodical. :)

As I stated earlier in this and the other thread, Mathis’s art applies long-established techniques to contemporary situations (his models). This does not make him a fraud by any means; simply, there is this non-creative, mechanical, impersonal element in his art, acting as the basis or skeleton for the personal creative work, an impurity rather like the speck of dirt necessary for a raindrop or snowflake or pearl to form. There is nothing in principle negative about this: however, there comes a stage when ossification becomes fossilization. In art this is the conventionality of academic art reaching breaking point. Manet’s Olympia blew the whistle on the hypocrisy of painting prostitutes disguised as naked goddesses. In other areas, conflict leading to weaponization of an over-dirty snowball (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?93959-Rigging-the-Election-DNC-Hillary-s-multi-front-assault.&p=1106985&viewfull=1#post1106985) can turn an innocent game into violence. Different points on a single scale.

Transpose this to science: there are scientists who believe the twentieth century was mostly a distraction, a wild goose chase, and recommend taking up where Maxwell left off. Unless I’m mistaken, Mathis is not doing that, so there seems to be a disconnect there. I’ll leave it to the scientists to explore the implications of that – in the context of the above-described ‘scientific method’.

Remember, I am talking about tolerance. See these posts: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?85903-Anomalies-in-The-Ruiner-s-material&p=1015248&viewfull=1#post1015248 http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?63451-The-Secret-Architecture-of-France--s-Capital&p=748408&viewfull=1#post748408

With Mathis, as earlier with Shane, tolerance is needed because, while it is easy to enjoy his snowball paintings, there is too much of the dirty snowball in his fake death and other theories. From being a heads-up warning people that things are not all they seem, the more the idea is generalized the more it tends towards saying that nothing is real: there is no snow in this snowball at all. Which amounts to saying there is nothing real about Miles Mathis either, and for that matter there is also nothing real about his reader. At that point, we have to beg to differ and say, yes, Miles Mathis might be a fake, a mere Internet presence concocted by multiple individuals. This was my not entirely idle speculation: the bad news is that I have no way of knowing, but the good news is that I absolutely don’t need to know and am perfectly happy for anyone to prove that speculation wrong. All I need to know is that I AM NOT a total fake, and therefore any hint to the contrary is to be rejected: he can speak for himself. This is where personal integrity and self-knowledge are involved in discernment. The fact that the idea may prove mistaken does not make it wrong to speculate. Discernment means entertaining (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?1420-Simon-Parkes-about-Mantis-Aliens-Reptiles-and-other-aliens.&p=1059762&viewfull=1#post1059762)a broad palette of possibilities, the ability even to see white as black and black as white. In this regard, the denunciation of St Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, is very possibly baseless (slanderous). It would be grounded only if he is talking in terms of mechanical, Satanical reversibility; it would be baseless if he is actually applying the principle outlined above. Bearing this in mind, we can abandon the gray area of calling-out/debunking, and take a dispassionate look at the way Miles Mathis tries to undermine the reputations of four prominent figures (actually more than four).

To round off this post, let me return to where I started: I have just explained why some of the things I write might be easily misunderstood – totally so – and why my membership on this forum hangs by a thread at all times. A new member truly guilty of slander, one would hope, would be unsubscribed forthwith, and so, one would hope, would a new member guilty of a false accusation of slander. If neither of these happens in a disagreement between established members, that would have to be because owing to its higher-than-average tolerance levels, the strictest legal sense of slander (or libel) is temporarily waived on this site. In the interest of serious discussion, our language needs to reflect this state of affairs.

[RunningDeer]

Glad you’re hanging around
Paula, I didn’t say I wasn’t withdrawing from the forum: more like hanging by a thread... I am in a kind of NDE state, meaning that I can slip either way and either is good. My membership is precious, but not so precious or addictive I cannot give it up.

Honestly, araucaria, sometimes I don’t feel like I fit in because it seems like a game of thinkers out-thinking thinkers. This is not intended as a poke-poke. The visual that popped in my mind is peeing on the bush last.

What makes me a simple human by comparison is the details are less important. Now I investigate for entertainment and curiosity. Truth be told, the more I study, the more stupid I feel. Fortunately, the information stays long enough for me to enhance an evolving perspective. The sense is it’s wholesome rather than a defect or old age. One of my objectives is spontaneous answers and solutions.

My interest is cleansing mind, body, spirit of what prevents me from optimum skill levels of what’s currently mislabeled as miraculous. And as Don Juan says, live an impeccable life. Beyond those tall orders, I enjoy the surprises this journey brings. The reactions to and how adaptable towards the changing circumstances? that's the feed back of my progress. If one day, I am called to assist in the world, these are the skills that’ll help the deep thinkers.

Paula ♡

:offtopic:

[araucaria]

The analogy of a single-strand cloak may apply to the conventional type of art; it is far too simplistic to account for a century of cutting-edge art on a global scale, which is more like a many-stranded tapestry. I don’t need (or wish) to debunk Mathis to make my point; all I need to do is to point out the existence of a few other strands. His stolen century theory places inordinate emphasis on one of the hats worn by one man – the intelligence activity of the attorney, art patron and collector John Quinn (http://www.jstor.org/stable/1594296?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents) – and on one exhibition mounted by him – The Armory Show in the US in 1913. However, there are all kinds of collectors, there are all kinds of exhibitions, all kinds of artists, and all kinds of relationships between the three. Here in Paris we currently have an exhibition of the Sergei Shchukin collection, western European paintings on show outside Russia for the very first time in a century. The catalogue contains a fascinating essay by Anna Poznanskaya and Alexei Petukhov on the Russian aspect of this very multipolar subject: very briefly, St Petersburg had no idea what was going on in Moscow. We may add that, while some collectors are genuine art lovers, and others (especially Americans) primarily investors; the mafia uses art works as large banknotes (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2016/sep/30/gangsters-use-of-paintings-as-currency-shows-profound-belief-in-art), and while it is possible and even likely that an intelligence operative would have infiltrated the scene, it is ludicrous to think that a whole century of art was ‘stolen’, and laughable to think that wherever he turned this guy met with intellectuals as corrupt as himself. And simply not true.

The rhetorical device for taking a part of something as the whole is called synecdoche (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synecdoche). Ordinarily it is an innocent figure of speech, but it is not always so innocent, and can even be weaponized when someone presents a piece of the puzzle as the big picture. Between these extremes, you find people getting overenthusiastic about whatever they are looking at: hammers and nails. I am not interested in assigning a precise position to any individual on that scale: I am simply pointing out the scale, and the fact that we can be mistaken about our position on it. I would add however that Mathis seems to be a little further along that scale than we thought when he reduces the likes of Ezra Pound and James Joyce to their relationship with John Quinn. As I said, no debunking is required, just a little additional conflicting input for contrast.

Another analogy comes to mind: a game of skittles, guilt by association. Mathis’s mudslinging (for that is what it can look like) builds up a huge body count of his own. In The Stolen Century, he writes for instance, “Wow. We have, at one swoop, connected Hemingway, Crowley, Stein, Joyce, Ford and Pound to Intelligence, and we have done it without leaving the whitewashed pages of Wikipedia.” WOW indeed: Without Overstepping Wikipedia. Given that just six degrees of separation will connect absolutely anyone to absolutely anyone else, and that we are talking about a literary circle implying just one degree of separation, it becomes very easy to ‘connect’ people; but simply pointing to such connections is worthless smear unless and until we flesh them out into something substantive. As forum members well understand, the Wikipedia formula with input from allcomers and behind-the-scenes editorial oversight is structurally exposed to misuse and the spread of disinfo, and therefore disqualified as a serious research tool. I personally tend to use it only to present the received wisdom on a subject, in order to question or otherwise process that received wisdom. Following hyperlinks is a useful aid to research; it is not research per se. Serious research goes directly to source material – primary sources: the person’s own writings; and secondary sources: other writings about that person. That is what I intend to do for Pound in the next post and for Joyce in a subsequent post.

[araucaria]

We get to Ezra Pound (http://www.spiked-online.com/review_of_books/article/pound-poet-and-political-prisoner/17499#.WA2xd0A6jL2) the writer from art as he and Wyndham Lewis were behind the Vorticist movement. Mathis quotes a piece of Pound’s poetry to show how bad a poet he is. The part is not the whole: you need to examine a little more to come up with an opinion. Would any member here like being dismissed on the basis of one or two of their less inspired posts? I don’t think so. Any person is so much more than even those who know them best can imagine, which is good reason for leaving a little leeway, but not of course an excuse for condoning misbehaviour. It takes into account the fact that people can and often do change, for better or for worse, and therefore labels about who people are will always be less accurate than statements about the specific things they do, which exemplify Sartrean mauvaise foi (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?79735-Rich-people-have-feelings-too&p=931608&viewfull=1#post931608) (bad faith).

So, to go beyond the admittedly poor piece of poetry from 1920, you only have to look at the later Cantos to see that Ezra Pound can have a wonderful way with words. To put it another way, he is a real poet; but unfortunately not in the sense of getting ecstatic about daffodils or snowflakes: good grief, he talks about such unsavoury things as war and money! But after all, if poetry is about expressing and sharing feelings, then you can write poetry expressing outrage, disgust and other associated feelings. Here are some excerpts:

On war:

War, one war after another,
Men start ’em who couldn’t put up a good hen-roost.

Or:

And because that son of a bitch,
Franz Josef of Austria. . . . . .
And because that son of a bitch Napoléon Barbiche...
They put Aldington on Hill 70, in a trench
dug through corpses
With a lot of kids of sixteen,
Howling and crying for their mamas,
And he sent a chit back to his major:
I can hold out for ten minutes
With my sergeant and a machine gun.
And they rebuked him for levity,
and Henri Gaudier went to it,
and they killed him,
And killed a good deal of sculpture,
And old T.E.H. he went to it,
With a lot of books from the library,
London library, and a shell buried ’em in a dug-out,
And the library expressed its annoyance.
And a bullet hit him on the elbow
... gone through the fellow in front of him,
And he read Kant in hospital, in Wimbledon,
in the original,
And the hospital staff didn’t like it.

And Wyndham Lewis went to it,
With a heavy bit of artillery,
and the airmen came by with a mitrailleuse,
And cleaned out most of his company,
and a shell lit on his tin hut,
While he was out in the privvy,
and he was all that was left of that outfit.

On money and power and conspiracy:

“Thou shalt not” said Martin Van Buren, “jail ’em for debt.”
“that an immigrant shd. set out with good banknotes
and find ’em at the end of his voyage
but waste paper... if a man have in primeval forest
set up his cabin, shall rich patroon take it from him?
High judges? Are, I suppose, subject to passions
as have affected other great and good men, also
subject to esprit de corps.
Or:
Esprit de corps in permanent bodies
“Of the same trade,” Smith, Adam, “men
“never gather together
“without a conspiracy against the general public.”
Independent use of money (our OWN)
toward holding OUR bank, own bank
and in it the deposits, received, where received.
De banchis cambi temendi...
Venice 1361,
’62..shelved for a couple of centuries..
“whether by privates or public...
currency OF (O, F, of) the nation,
Toward producing that wide expanse of clean lawn
Toward that deer park toward
the playing fields, congeries, swimming pools, undsoweiter;

On the suppression of new technology:

Sabotage? Yes, he took it up to Manhattan,
To the big company, and they said: Impossible.
And he said: I gawt ten thousand dollars tew mak ’em,
And I am a going’ tew mak ’em, and you’ll damn well
Have to install ’em, awl over the place,
And they said: Oh we can’t have it.
So he settled for one-half of one million,
And he has a very nice place on the Hudson,
And that invention, patent, is still in their desk
[...]
So we sat there, with the old kindly professor,
And the stubby little man was up-stairs.
And there was the slick guy in the other
corner reading The Tatler,
not upside down but never turning the pages,
And then i went up to the bed-room, and he said,
The stubby fellow: Perfectly true,
“But it’s a question of feeling,
“Can’t move ’em with a cold thing, like economics.”
And so we came down stairs and went out,
And the slick guy looked out of the window,
And in came the street “Lemme-at-’em
Like a bull-dog in a macintosh.
O my Clio!
Then the telephone didn’t work for a week.

On the press:

“Sure they want war,” said Bill Yeats,
“They want all the young gals for themselves.”
That llovely unconscious world
slop over slop, and blue ribbons
“Pig and Piffle” they called it in private
10 pence per copy to make, 6 pence on the stands
and each year 20 thousand in profits
Pays to control the Times, for its effect on the market
“where there is no censorship by the state
there is a great deal of manipulation...”
and news sense?

In addition to his poetry, and his book An ABC of Reading, Pound authored The ABC of Economics. I don’t have access to the full document at scribd (https://fr.scribd.com/document/153882494/The-ABC-of-Economics-by-Ezra-Pound) [update: full text available here (http://www.counter-currents.com/2015/10/remembering-ezra-pound-5/)] but here is a sample, on the ideology of scarcity:


Democracy implies that the mass must take the responsibility for choosing his rulers and representatives, and for the maintenance of his own 'rights' against the possible and probable encroachments of the government which he has sanctioned to act for him in public matters. These encroachments in so far as they were political; in so far as they were special privileges handed down from medieval chaos and feudal arrangements have been from time to time more or less put in order. Jefferson and John Adams observed that in their young days very few men had thought about 'government'. There were very few writers on 'government'. The study of economics is a later arrival. An economic library in 1800 could have been packed in a trunk. Some economic problems could perhaps be considered via political analogy, but a greater number cannot. Probably the only economic problem needing emergency solution in our time is the problem of distribution. There are enough goods, there is superabundant capacity to produce goods in superabundance. Why should anyone starve? That is the crude and rhetorical question. It is as much our question as Hamlet's melancholy was the problem of the renaissance dyspeptic. And the answer is that nobody should. The 'science' or study of economics is intended to make sure no one does.

There is Enough

How are you going to get it from where it is, or can be, to where it is not and is needed? I spare the reader the old history of barter, etc. Apples for rabbits; slips of paper from the owner ordering his servants to give to the bearer two barrels of beer; generalized tokens of gold, leather; paper inscribed with a 'value' as of 16 ounces of copper; metal by weight; checks with fantastic figures; all serve or have served to shift wealth, wheat and beef from one place to another or to move wool cloth from Flanders to Italy.

Who is to have these Tokens?

Obviously, certain men deserve well of humanity or of other limited numbers of men.
Those who grow wheat, those who make cloth and harness, those who carry these things from where they are in superfluity to where they are needed, by pushcarts and airplanes, etc.

AND ALSO THOSE who know where things are, or who discover new and easier means of getting them 'out', coal from the earth, energy from an explosion of gasoline. Makers, transporters, facilitators, and those who contribute to their pleasure or comfort or whom it pleases them favour . . usual sequence of children, if they have or want children, aged parents who have earned their affection.

All of which would seem perfectly simple and idyllic, but then we come to the jam.
Some of the people who work or who could and would work are left without paper tokens.

Someone else has all the tokens, or someone else has done all the work 'needed.'
CURIOUSLY ENOUGH, despite the long howls of those who used to complain about being oppressed and overworked, the last thing human beings appear to wish to share is WORK.

The last thing the exploiters want is to let their employees divide is labor.

IT IS NEVERTHELESS UNDENIABLE that if no one were allowed to work (this year 1933) more than (5) hours a day, there would be hardly anyone out of a job and no family without paper tokens potent enough to permit them to eat.Hence it does actually make a great deal of sense to treat Pound as a psychiatric case. In 2010-11 I wrote a short-book-length study on the relationship of finance and mental health, with reference to the art historian and banking rebel Aby Warburg, so this is a subject I know a thing or two about. Warburg was in fact truly insane for a while at the end of the Great War, threatening to kill his wife and children; but he made an unexpected recovery, and was even given one last clean bill of mental health on the very day he died. I will try to post his story asap as it is germane to the picture I am painting here. I will just add one further comment for now: when I talk of rounded personalities, with unexpected features that do not fit the preconceived label, the same goes for families. The Warburg banking family is notorious notably for Paul Warburg’s involvement in creating the Fed, but his eldest brother Aby rejected the entire banking business and became a brilliant art historian instead. His biography is split into three separate sections, namely as brother to the bankers, as iconographer, and as a psychiatric patient. My study weaves those three strands together, to reach an unexpected conclusion. This dark family has its own internal light which it tries unsuccessfully to control, literally driving it mad at times. Catch 22 madness.

Rather than suggesting that Ezra Pound is a lousy poet suitable for dumbing down the masses, the hatchet job on him conveniently overlooks the fact that the poet loudly expresses these inconvenient political convictions, and that would be reason enough to send him to an asylum, however unorthodox the procedure followed. It would definitely NOT be a good reason for putting him out (like Joyce) in plain sight on the education curriculum in order artificially to boost their sales, as Maths claims. I have a quote from the non-mainstream economist Silvio Gesell: “Surely the psychiatrists know the difference between political conviction and a delusion... Ezra Pound has no delusions in any strictly pathological sense.” Clearly we are talking about two different people, or two different facets to the same person, or two different stages of that person’s evolution. You find two stages in the career of any whistle-blower: they had to be an insider first; hence blowing the whistle automatically involves a change of face, turning inside out. It becomes all too simple to debunk such an individual. How can we know which side someone is on, when they have switched sides at least once?

[araucaria]

Here is my suggestion. In the case of Pound, as his name prompts us, follow the money. Mathis here returns to his fakery meme, saying that Pound was probably never confined at all, and we are forgetting that we were not there to check him out. Well, one guy who was there, and did check him out, was a fellow writer by the name of Eustace Mullins, yes that Eustace Mullins: author of The Secrets of the Federal Reserve, a book that was burned in Germany in 1961 (shades of Fahrenheit 451; Joyce also had his books burned). Mullins states that on his visits to Pound at St Elizabeth’s mental hospital, as someone working at the Library of Congress he was commissioned by Pound to research the Fed for the sum of ten dollars a week until the funds ran out. Here are a couple of excerpts from the Foreword.

In 1949, while I was visiting Ezra Pound who was a political prisoner at St.
Elizabeth's Hospital, Washington, D.C. (a Federal institution for the insane),
Dr. Pound asked me if I had ever heard of the Federal Reserve System. I
replied that I had not, as of the age of 25. He then showed me a ten dollar bill
marked "Federal Reserve Note" and asked me if I would do some research
at the Library of Congress on the Federal Reserve System which had issued
this bill. Pound was unable to go to the Library himself, as he was being held
without trial as a political prisoner by the United States government. After
he was denied broadcasting time in the U.S., Dr. Pound broadcast from Italy
in an effort to persuade people of the United States not to enter World War
II. Franklin D. Roosevelt had personally ordered Pound's indictment,
spurred by the demands of his three personal assistants, Harry Dexter
White, Lauchlin Currie, and Alger Hiss, all of whom were subsequently
identified as being connected with Communist espionage.
I had no interest in money or banking as a subject, because I was working on
a novel. Pound offered to supplement my income by ten dollars a week for a
few weeks. My initial research revealed evidence of an international banking
group which had secretly planned the writing of the Federal Reserve Act and
Congress' enactment of the plan into law. These findings confirmed what
Pound had long suspected. He said, "You must work on it as a detective
story." I was fortunate in having my research at the Library of Congress
directed by a prominent scholar, George Stimpson, founder of the National
Press Club, who was described by The New York Times of September 28,
1952: "Beloved by Washington newspapermen as 'our walking Library of
Congress', Mr. Stimpson was a highly regarded reference source in the
Capitol. Government officials, Congressmen and reporters went to him for
information on any subject."
I did research four hours each day at the Library of Congress, and went to
St. Elizabeth's Hospital in the afternoon. Pound and I went over the previous
day's notes. I then had dinner with George Stimpson at Scholl's Cafeteria
while he went over my material, and I then went back to my room to type up
the corrected notes. Both Stimpson and Pound made many suggestions in
guiding me in a field in which I had no previous experience. When Pound's
resources ran low, I applied to the Guggenheim Foundation, Huntington
Hartford Foundation, and other foundations to complete my research on the
Federal Reserve. Even though my foundation applications were sponsored by
the three leading poets of America, Ezra Pound, E.E. Cummings, and
Elizabeth Bishop, all of the foundations refused to sponsor this research.
[...]
After my initial shock at discovering that the most influential literary
personality of the twentieth century, Ezra Pound, was imprisoned in "the
Hellhole" in Washington, I immediately wrote for assistance to a Wall Street
financier at whose estate I had frequently been a guest. I reminded him that
as a patron of the arts, he could not afford to allow Pound to remain in such
inhuman captivity. His reply shocked me even more. He wrote back that
"your friend can well stay where he is." It was some years before I was able
to understand that, for this investment banker and his colleagues, Ezra
Pound would always be "the enemy".
(my emphasis) https://archive.org/stream/TheSecretsOfTheFederalReserve/MullinsEustace-TheSecretsOfTheFederalReserve227P._djvu.txt This leads to the following interesting situation, where the red string suddenly stops unravelling and is clearly tied in a knot. There you have in plain terms the contradiction whereby Miles Mathis becomes unstuck: not only could ‘a patron of the arts (...) afford to allow Pound to remain in such inhuman captivity’, it was in his interest to do so as ‘the enemy’. Alternatively, if he means to debunk Mullins as well, then Mathis would have to be himself on the side of the intelligence services he claims to be denouncing.

Returning now to another patron of the arts, John Quinn, we encounter the same contradiction; for if Pound was handled, i.e. funded, by Quinn, then secret service cash was being used to fund Mullins’s disclosure of the Federal Reserve system. This makes little sense, and is in fact in total contradiction with subsequent policy, for in 1967 at least, the CIA (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-02-23/1967-he-cia-created-phrase-conspiracy-theorists-and-ways-attack-anyone-who-challenge)did “not recommend that discussion of the [conspiracy] question be initiated where it is not already taking place”

However, since Wikipedia has no love for Eustace Mullins (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eustace_Mullins), and since he probably cannot be trusted to speak of Paul Warburg even when quoting Paul Warburg’s own words on the need for secrecy, from his autobiography, I shall look elsewhere for information on the Warburg-Fed issue, no further in fact than the almost official family biography by Ron Chernow, a hefty tome that I myself have studied and analyzed. But for the same reason, I shan’t be quoting myself either, preferring to quote a book review (http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v15/v15n5p33_weir.html) for The Institute for Historical Review by John Weir who begins by saying, “So sympathetic is Chernow's portrayal that it can rightly be regarded as an authorized version of events”.

Along with many other bankers, Chernow explains, Paul Warburg was unhappy with the risk inherent in America's decentralized banking system. The central bank he envisioned for the United States would insure against future "panics" and do away with much of the risk of banking. To this end, he played a key but secretive role in this project:
“In November 1910, [Senator] Aldrich [of Rhode Island], Paul [Warburg], and four other experts sneaked off to discuss bank reform at a secret hideaway on Jekyll Island off the Georgia coast. With Democrats now in control of Congress and Progressives railing against Wall Street, the bankers had to travel incognito, lest they be accused of hatching a cabal.”
As part of the elaborate charade, the conference participants pretended to be sportsmen, outfitting themselves as duck hunters.
What Chernow does not adequately explain is why such secrecy was necessary if a central bank was really such a great idea. We are told, in effect, that Warburg and others hatched a cabal to avoid being accused of hatching a cabal.
Because it was the product of a furtive conclave, and secrecy still surrounds many central bank decision-making activities, it is hardly surprising that there are so many dark suspicions and "banking conspiracy" theories involving the Federal Reserve Bank.[my emphasis]I would simply conclude by suggesting that this fairly mainstream review is more suspicious of what is going on here than the man intent on exposing as many frauds as possible. Just as the Wikipedia article immediately steers the reader away from Mullins by calling him ‘antisemitic’ and a ‘Holocaust denier’, Miles Mathis steers the reader away from even getting as far as Mullins by denouncing Pound who mentored him. For all I know, in some circumstances, Mullins maybe was ‘antisemitic’ and a ‘Holocaust denier’; but that hardly debunks everything he ever wrote or said. Likewise, when Miles Mathis tells us that Pound was at one time an intelligence asset and a lousy poet, that does not invalidate my statement that at another time Pound was a whistle-blower and a very decent poet. Since I for one can live with more than one side to Pound’s career, in terms of character development as opposed to the cardboard cutout model, I might also speculate how his poetry improved dramatically just as soon as he found his soul and started being his own man...

[ThePythonicCow]

.
My accusing you of slander in my earlier thread (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94363-The-physics-of-atomic-nuclei-chemical-bonding-light-gravity-electromagnetics--Miles-Mathis-&p=1111489&viewfull=1#post1111489) was using too sharp a stick, and uncalled for. I should have been more accurate, tentative and focused in presenting my differing view.


Similarly, if you heard that Miles Mathis was working on Princess Diana, you would know it would be to show she never died.
Good point. That's exactly what Miles would conclude - she never died. I agree with you that Miles over uses his "no one died" hammer. Some bolts, screws, and latches have gotten seriously smashed in Miles analysis.


Transpose this to science: there are scientists who believe the twentieth century was mostly a distraction, a wild goose chase, and recommend taking up where Maxwell left off. Unless I’m mistaken, Mathis is not doing that, so there seems to be a disconnect there.
I don't think that Miles understands Maxwell's equations much at all. I have not seen evidence that Miles even has the math skills to consider Maxwell's work. I'd rather recommend Robert Distinti, another amateur who endeavors to overhaul our understanding of the physics of matter, energy, electro-magnetism and light, for his insights into Maxwell's work.

The strength of Miles physics that delighted me was his awareness of the physical shapes and geometries and motions that might be involved in the manifestation of light, matter, energy and forces, from the ether.

But Miles Mathis is like a painter with a pallet that has only various shades of blue colors on it. That blue dress is brilliantly shown, but the red rose in the lady's hand is but a fuzzy shadow in the sea of blue.

(... and yes, I'd agree with those who think that relativity and quantum mechanics were a century long distraction ... and perhaps not surprisingly, given my fondness for tin-foil-hat conspiracies, I suspect that the distraction was deliberate. )

[Helene West]

First I apologize for not being able to read all the OP's posts on this thread. I opened the thread with enthusiasm but when I saw right away the OP was referencing an involved older thread that one would have to find and refer back to, in addition to the long posts contained in this thread, I vegged-out. I tend to feel if you're going to start a new thread start it fresh so someone reading for the first time gets the gist without having to sink time into backtracking.

The above being said:
It was a Happy Day for me when I discovered Miles m around six months ago.
I enjoy his essays so much that for fun (my boring idea of fun) i started some casual notes on famous people with their relationships to other famous people and events, how so many are related to military intelligence, how many are really jews or half jews, etc.

I think the latter was the biggest eye-opener for me. It now makes sense that so many famous and/or influential people we thought were/are gentile are really jews in relation to today's Cultural genocide of gentile caucasian people by superrich caucasian policymakers. I think jews throughout the centuries never really identified with western culture anyhow, they adapted and sought to thrive within it but never identified with it hence the zeal with which they are endeavoring to tear it asunder... Just a thought... I'm sure the ruling class has ample depraved gentiles and both groups do some intermarrying but growing up as a typical dumb shiksa I projected gentile onto the outer world screen. Finding out that I was purposely led to see a gentile world and how stealthily jews have disguised their influence has been another piece of the culture puzzle that blows my mind.

I too at some point wondered if Miles is a disinfo guy himself . I tend to think not just because of his constant warnings of our being misdirected. He is too smart to not know that people like us who will read his stuff will also not let him off the hook and wonder about him as an agent as well. I personally think he is a bitter guy who became thus as an artist discovering how controlled the art world was and how dedicated to 'crap for the masses' TPTB were. When he discovered at a younger age that Art was controlled as much as politics and entertainment were controlled he became on the warpath ever since. Hence his embittered attitude that almost every public event and personage is fake.

I take what he writes with grains of salt but at least for me he has made a fascinating contribution to understanding modern culture. I for one would never have thought to look up genealogies of famous people before reading him. As far as disinfo well this very forum, as much as I'm growing to love it, could be a mechanism for controlled opposition as well so I take everything with grains of salt these days but doggone it I'm looking for some enjoyment while I'm possibly being hoodwinked!!

My biggest complaint of Miles m so far is that he doesn't emphasize the Why's. Why the need for some of these false flags and fake events and false biographies. That part is still murky for me.

I would also love for someone who is knowledgeable with his essays, his deconstruction essays - not the art or science ones, to suggest which ones to start with if you were coming across his work for the first time to understand his premises better as I am kind of all over the place with his essays.

Very cynical people have a definite place in my world and, he makes me laugh which scores BIG points!

[ThePythonicCow]

... and, he makes me laugh which scores BIG points!
Yes - he's a delight. He has his (in some cases substantial) limitations, but being afraid to "think outside the box" is certainly not one of them.

[Foxie Loxie]

I had to take a break to "catch my breath"! :flame:

[Helene West]

Lazy Helene West wants to cut corners and ask anyone who's read Miles works - What do you feel is the Main Premise of his deconstruction essays, not the art or science essays as I've not read them, but the essays where he is analyzing the genealogy of famous people and/or famous events?

I'm lazy because I'm not taking the time to sit down and seriously go over an entire essay as I read them but I'm like a kid in a candy store picking out all different essays and reading a little of many cause he is still a novelty to me.

I feel I'm missing whatever is his main premises/s. I can come up with reappearing sub-premises but what is the main point of all these many essays if there is one?

Some sub-premises of M Mathis that I've uncovered for myself thus far are:

• Many historical and/or current events which we thought were spontaneous were premeditated, staged.
• Many protagonists in cultural/historical/news events did not die or were killed as we were told but faked their deaths.
• Many famous individuals from entertainment to politics lie about their background and genealogy.
• The ruling class wants to keep beauty and talent for themselves, the masses get the ugly, immoral and dumbed-down, etc.
• For several hundred years, possibly changing only up until very recently, the ruling class has wanted us to feel/believe that gentiles ruled us and gentiles were the ones in positions of fame and power when it appears that a great percentage of them are jewish. Many family names have been altered to appear more gentile than jewish.

These are some of what I think are his main sub-premises. Like I mentioned I feel there is some main premise he is making that is right in front of me but I'm still not getting it yet. Your thoughts? thx

[Ewan]

I tip my hat to you araucaria, I just learnt quite a lot over the last 24 hrs.

[araucaria]

Joyce: introduction

James Joyce is a rather different proposition: Mathis has to admit that he is good. For him, Joyce, Pound and Hemingway are rather like the good, the bad and the ugly, making for a decent film script; but hold on, isn’t Mathis the guy who denounces movie actors for playing dead in real life? For all its quality, he can only make one tiny quote from Joyce’s mammoth masterpiece Ulysses (http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4300), something about British spies in Dublin. It will be readily understood that this is insufficient to understand what Joyce the writer is all about, a deficiency I shall be remedying later. And since Joyce the person, about whom we are told even less, very much takes a back seat to Joyce the writer, then this ‘portrait of the artist’, as he titles one of his novels, is no more than a sketchy outline. This is very unfortunate as there is so much material out there, not just his own fiction and letters (the reader can start right here (http://classiclit.about.com/od/portraitofanartist/a/A-Portrait-Of-An-Artist-As-A-Young-Man-Quotes.htm)), but Joyce studies are a whole branch of academia, starting with Richard Ellmann’s 1000-page biography, James Joyce, which draws from another generous source: the published works of Joyce’s brother Stanislaus, including My Brother’s Keeper from which two important quotes alone provide an adequate response to Miles Mathis’s allegations regarding the debasement of art – quotes that are only a couple of clicks away on the Internet, the way he seems to like it.

"It seems to me little short of a miracle that anyone should have striven to cultivate poetry or cared to get in touch with the current of European thought while living in a household such as ours, typical as it was of the squalor of a drunken generation. Some inner purpose transfigured him."
"In our world today, serious literature has taken the place of religion. People with liberty of choice go... to literature for enlightened understanding... And it answers in parables." http://classiclit.about.com/cs/productreviews/fr/aa_mybrother.htm As to the baser claim that Joyce was recruited by a spymaster, presumably for financial gain, another preferred source, Wikipedia, demolishes that in a single sentence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislaus_Joyce): ‘The diary indicates that Stanislaus, truly "his brother's keeper", was called upon to rescue his brother from financial difficulties time and time again.’ So, where did the money go? Or are we to conclude that the ‘inner purpose’ that Stanislaus says ‘transfigured him’ was... political collusion?

It is not enough to dismiss this as a ridiculous claim. I intend to labour the point until it becomes perfectly clear that Miles Mathis is mistaken. Why he is mistaken is none of my business; I imagine he is in good faith. He says no one is able to tell him why Hemingway is good: when I have explained exactly why Joyce is good, he may like to reread Hemingway possibly in a different light. I will explain the difference between this self-styled artist and Mathis’s beloved Dickens whom Joyce describes as a ‘story-teller’. Joyce is hardly disparaging Dickens any more than he is disparaging Homer, the father of story-telling, by reworking the Odyssey in Ulysses. So, once again, my aim is not to debunk Mathis; since he is bona fide a priori, then he can either change his mind about Joyce or come up with a more serious argument, with more evidence to bolster his view and pursue this discussion. I have reservations myself about Joyce, but they can only be made clear after reviewing quite a bit of material first. Basically, it is not about rejecting, but about seeing a chronological sequence in writers for their time: just as Dickens is a 19th c. writer, Joyce is an early 20th c. writer, making him actually somewhat... Dickensian when viewed from another hundred years down the line.

The claim that Joyce sought (almost single-handedly it would seem) to kill the novel as a subversive art form is rather preposterous in that it only needs someone to point to evidence of his singular failure in that supposed enterprise: I shall be quoting a few 20th century novels that got past Joyce. But to be fair, in a sense he was actually trying to kill off the opposition, but not at all in the way or for the purpose described by Mathis. As I shall show, it was actually his Dickensian side showing through. However, it is ludicrous to imagine that a personage as insignificant as John Quinn had anything to do with it. In Hélène Cixous’s 850-page thesis on the novels, L’Exil de James Joyce (Paris, Grasset, 1968), a thirty-page section is titled ‘Non serviam’. This Luciferian statement of intent, I will not serve, is not only a rejection of things like religion (Christianity and his Jesuit education), or nationalism (as an Irishman fully embracing the enemy England, at least with respect to the language – as a master of English who did not speak Gaelic) (cf. ‘Joyce would not make obeisance to the passwords of Nationalism any more than to the passwords of the Church. In Mullingar he had offended the citizenry by rebuking them for their antagonism to the English.’ Stanley Gebler Davies, James Joyce: a Portrait of the Artist, London, Granada, 1982, p.70). It is the assertion of artistic freedom, which inevitably involves all kinds of ambivalence that can be seen in terms of either heresy or creativity. We are talking about a much more powerful force than can be simply bribed. An ability to resist bribery in the early 20th century was hardly unlikely, since we have a much more recent example: the French student movement of May 1968 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?78782-Charlie-Hebdo-shooting-eleven-dead-at-Paris-offices-of-satirical-magazine&p=921033&viewfull=1#post921033).

Why Mathis harks back to Dickens as seemingly the last dangerous threat to the social status quo is precisely because he and Dickens are both ‘story-tellers’. Returning to his own analogy, the story-teller spins a good yarn: events are conjoined (with simple conjunctions) or compiled (into a pile, like the pile of a carpet: single loose strands placed side by side) giving the appearance of a single, easily unravelled strand. Such story-telling is far too simplistic to account for a century of cutting-edge art on a global scale, which is more densely composed and constructed, like a many-stranded tapestry. For example:

the magical, authoritarian properties of ‘And’.
The vogue for this conjunction dates back to the translation of the Bible and the Book of Genesis. Pure story-telling: no whats or whys or hows or whens. And God did this. (dot) And God said that. (dot) And Man thought, Wow! And God said do this and do that. And Man just did what he was told.
Then closer to home: And a plane came along and hit WTC1. (dot) And WTC1 was destroyed. (dot) And before anyone could say ‘This has never happened before’, corroboration came. And another plane came along and hit WTC2. (dot) And WTC2 was destroyed. (dot) And so on and so forth. Until someone said, ‘Let’s join some of those dots.’ http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=563080&viewfull=1#post563080

[araucaria]

This post addresses James Joyce’s alleged corruptibility. It is based on the flimsiest of evidence: a couple of sentences in his works of fiction:

Although the evidence for the central role of Intelligence has always been there, it of course hasn't been
promoted, and it has retreated into the shadows. The evidence can even be found in the works of the
Moderns themselves, as I showed previously with Burrough's Naked Lunch. The same is easy to show
with Ulysses and Portrait of the Artist, in which Joyce talks about the British spies in Dublin Castle.
And in Dubliners (p. 96), Mr. Henchy “knows for a fact” that half the Radical Nationalists in Dublin
are “in the pay of the Castle.” Who would have thought that Joyce himself was among them, or soon
would be? I haven't (yet) found any evidence Joyce was subverting the Irish causes, but since he was
certainly promoting the Modernist causes, he was in the service of one of the main Intelligence
programs of his time. Since this program served the rich families at the expense of art history, we see
that Joyce is an anti-hero in a different way that you have thought. Although he showed real early
talent in both poetry and novel writing, he chose instead to sell out his birthright as a real artist for the
money and fame of a bought one. Ulysses is the public record of that sell-out. When a fictional character “knows for a fact”, the reader only knows for a fiction that may or may not be based in fact. Similarly, when a researcher says ‘I haven’t found..., but’, the reader knows that what comes after the ‘but’ is explicitly baseless speculation, and possibly libellous if someone’s reputation is at stake. In his own words in an earlier paragraph, It is self-confessedly not deep research: ‘All this information is at Wikipedia, so I am not leaking anything here or doing any deep research.’ And remember how he got started on John Quinn in this paper: ‘Who is John Quinn? According to Wikipedia...’ However, if you do try to dig a little deeper, as I am doing, you get a very different picture.

Mathis suggests that Joyce sacrificed his art to the lure of money from John Quinn, an art collector and lawyer who defended Ulysses at the obscenity trial in the US. I shall now demonstrate this theory to be ludicrous on both counts: he did not sacrifice his art, nor did he give in to the lure of money.

Taking the second point first, Quinn was an art collector: as such, he bought Joyce’s manuscripts, presumably as artworks. He bought the play Exiles in March 1917 (Ellmann, Fr. ed. Vol. 2, p.36). On 20 August, Joyce wrote to Pound asking where the advance money was. He works out that Quinn wrote to Pound on 8 July saying it was on its way. Not very reliable. Regarding this play, Gebler Davies writes, ‘He [Quinn] did not like the play when he got round to reading it but was happy to part with £20 for the corrected proofs of the American edition of A Portrait’ (op. cit. p.249). (The sum I read elsewhere was £200 in £50 instalments.)

So we have two strange things right there. First, if Joyce was an informer, then he would at least expect prompt payment for his services, especially if such payment was disguised as valuable consideration for his most precious productions; for then the payment was the primary concern, and the MS a mere pretext. We have corroboration of Quinn’s financial unreliability. In a letter of December 1918, Joyce reports Pound’s story of Quinn’s purchase of £300 worth of pictures from Wyndham Lewis: ‘unpaid for’. Quinn bought the MS of Ulysses in 1920 in instalments (Ellmann, Vol. 2, p.118). In his letters Joyce indicates that Quinn took a month to offer 700 frs down, and later ‘1500 frs down, without naming the ultimate sum.’ (3 Jan 1920). On 29 August 1920 he wrote his brother ‘Quinn sent 3500 frs’. On 19 November 1923, he wrote, ‘This muddled year is ending badly for me as my treasury is now approaching the condition of a Torricellian vacuum [...] Mr Quinn was to have sent me a cheque in settlement of the Ulysses MS but as you see did not do so.’ This is with reference to Quinn’s selling it on: see below.

Secondly, if Quinn was seeking to guide his (Joyce’s) output in a modernist direction, then his not liking the play is indicative of failure in that enterprise. And selling on the novel is indicative of continued failure over a period of several years and three major works of an author who published only very few. Pound arranged the first meeting between the two men only in October 1923 (Quinn died in August 1924), when they don’t seem to have hit it off very well. According to Ellmann, Joyce was unhappy with the way Quinn had handled the prepublication of Ulysses in Little Review; I would add that he was probably unhappy at his defence of the book at the trial: on the grounds that it was not obscene, only disgusting. Joyce was also unhappy when Quinn said he would be auctioning the MS for around $2000, and offered him a 50% cut (it was sold shortly afterwards for $1975). No doubt he had worked out that since Quinn had only paid him 3500 frs in 1920, which I gather comes to around $250, Quinn was cashing in heavily on his own ’20,000 hours’ of toil for a quick profit of $500 – double the original purchase price.

It seems overall, then, that John Quinn was mostly interested in squeezing out of James Joyce, not so much intelligence as maybe a fast buck. Since we don’t know for sure that he was buying information (where is the evidence?), but we do know he was buying manuscripts, which he didn’t like, and had cash coming in faster than it was going out (Joyce’s own cash flow in reverse), we can conclude that this was likely the only ‘intelligence’ Joyce was leaking, and we can conclude that it wasn’t modernist (i.e. fake) enough either. To confirm this latter point, we need to study the internal evidence: the writings themselves – see my next post. As to the former, we have a wealth of indirect confirmatory evidence above and beyond the direct dealings between the two men, which I propose to examine now, the reason being that in a very real sense the two aspects are closely intertwined: in other words his artistry is what makes him (largely) incorruptible.

Joyce is well known to have been fairly penniless throughout his life. Not only did he rely heavily on Stanislaus Joyce his ‘brother’s keeper’ as mentioned above, he occasionally received financial help – sometimes anonymously, sometimes (very unreliably) from Quinn – which allowed him periods to work on his writing, for which he had given up the chance to become an opera singer, but at other times he would return to teaching English as a foreign language at the Berlitz school. If he had had a steady source of income such as from Quinn, he would not have been teaching, but writing. He also had two major drains on his resources: first his own eyesight, involving multiple operations that left him almost blind in one eye; and second his children: his daughter Lucia was schizophrenic (at one stage in the 1930s costing him three quarters of his income (Ellmann, French edition, Vol 2, p.344), and his son Georgio seems never to have achieved financial independence either. One of the donations from an anonymous admirer involves Pound and Quinn, but only indirectly. The anonymity is important here, because a handler would surely need to make his asset very clear as to where the cash was coming from. About Pound, Joyce writes this in a letter to Harriet Shaw Weaver dated 1 February 1927:

He makes brilliant discoveries and howling blunders. He misled me hopelessly as to the source of the first benefaction in Zurich and since then I have not relied on his perspicacity. A minute after I had made his acquaintance at Desenzano as we drove across the country by night he asked me ‘Was it John Quinn then?’! My high tenor shout of ‘Who?’ must have been heard in Milan. A follow-up letter dated 18 February goes further into Pound’s ‘soundness of judgement’, this time on a literary matter: overrating some poor quality poetry. Hence Pound was not entirely reliable in more than one area: no hanging offence. But it does mean that you cannot know what Pound was thinking or doing by extrapolating from other things he thought or did: that would be to apply to his case a form of reliability which he simply did not possess. Joyce could be equally unreliable in financial matters, sometimes detailing his every expenditure in a letter in proof of his impecunious state, at others splashing out on taxis and expensive meals for his friends. Errare humanum est (‘errare’ originally means to wander): unpredictability is an endearing but exasperating human trait, and one that is both inescapable and vitally useful. We deny or renounce it at our peril.

Just how far, then, might Joyce be tempted to sacrifice his art? Judging by a letter of 30 May 1906 to Grant Richard, the would-be publisher of Dubliners, not very far at all. A contract had already been signed, when a couple of changes were requested. One involved dropping or altering the sentence ‘she changed the position of her legs often’; also a couple of expletives (‘bloody’) needed to be removed (while others were overlooked); and that was about all. Not a big deal either way, one would have thought. But whatever we may think is totally irrelevant since the publisher thought it impossible to publish, and the author thought it impossible to give way. The blunt fact of the matter we have to deal with is set out by Joyce himself:

You say it is a small thing I am asked to do, to efface a word here and there. But do you not see clearly that in a short story above all such effacement may be fatal. You cannot say that the phrases objected to are gratuitous and impossible to print and at the same time approve of the tenor of the book. [...] I cannot understand what has been admired in the book at all if these passages have been condemned. [...]
The appeal to my pocket has not much weight with me. Of course, I would gladly see the book in print and of course I would like to make money by it. But, on the other hand, I have very little intention of prostituting whatever talent I may have to the public. (This letter is not for publication.) I am not an emissary from a War Office testing a new explosive or an eminent doctor praising a new medicine or a sporting cyclist riding a new make of bicycle or a renowned tenor singing a song by a new composer; and therefore the appeal to my pocket does not touch me as deeply as it otherwise might. You say you will be sorry if the book must pass from your list. I will be extremely sorry. But what can I do? I have thought the matter over and looked over the book again and I think you are making much ado about nothing.Joyce himself answers the spying charge a century in advance: ‘I am not an emissary from a War Office’ liable to be corrupted.

[araucaria]

While, as I indicated earlier, Miles Mathis’s ‘The Stolen Century’ is ostensibly about Ernest Hemingway, he reserves his parting shot for James Joyce. His last word on Hemingway comes a little earlier:

You may want to sit down, because here comes the clincher. You will say we have no evidence
Hemingway ever worked for Intelligence, so this whole paper is push to a conclusion. But we do. It is
now known that Hemingway worked for Intelligence in WW2. He not only worked for OSS (the
precursor to the CIA), he worked for Navy Intelligence ONI, the FBI, and even worked with the
Russian Intelligence agency NKVD (the precursor to the KGB). How do I know? The CIA admits it
on their own website. Of course they try to spin it in their own way, but for my thesis here it doesn't
much matter how they spin it. The admission by itself is fatal to Hemingway, since I can now ask you
this $64,000 question: if you can believe Hemingway was with Intelligence in WW2, what is keeping
you from believing he was with Intelligence during and after WW1? The time period in question in
this paper (the peak of the Stein salon) was only about 15 years earlier than 1941. I have just shown
you a lot of evidence that Hemingway was always in Intelligence, and since I have just proved it
beyond any doubt for the period after 1941, you may wish to look again at the evidence before 1941.
This refers to ‘A Spy Who Made His Own Way: Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy’ by Nicholas Reynolds posted as Reynolds-Hemingsway A Dubious Spy.pdf and downloadable at https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol.-56-no.-2/a-spy-who-made-his-own-way-ernest-hemingway-wartime-spy.html

I had not intended to look into Hemingway, knowing less about this author, but I took a look anyway, as we are beginning to see a pattern here. Mathis has this knack of extrapolating from person X to person Y or from one time period to another. As we saw earlier with Ezra Pound, Pound learnt things, which changed his behaviour, but not necessarily his character; behaviour varies according to circumstance, while character is somewhat stable; it is what determines one’s reaction to circumstance, and is relatively resistant to its own modification by circumstance. So I cannot deduce from Hemingway’s activity in the wartime 1940s what he was up to in the peacetime 1920s. What I can and will do is take this document, for which a link is indeed provided on the CIA website, and see what it says about Hemingway’s character – and indeed also about his activity in the 1940s, which is far from being as damning as Mathis makes out, merely by hinting he was in intelligence (enough said).

Taking the conclusion first, which carries extra weight as the conflation of multiple opinions:

We are left with the irony that four organizations that could not agree on much—the NKVD, OSS, FBI, and Department of State—all arrived separately at the same conclusion: Ernest Hemingway may have wanted to be a spy, but he never lived up to his potential.My purpose again is not to debunk Mathis: it is to observe how commonalities between person X and person Y (here Hemingway and Joyce, plus person Z, Pound) may be established, not by extrapolation, but by careful comparison of individual behaviours and the stabler character traits that these indicate. This is what we all do all the time: intelligence services vetting potential collaborators do it, as exemplified in this document. And sometimes people are friends simply because they are temperamentally suited to each other; it’s called personal chemistry. What they are precedes what they do.

To begin with, I have to confess a misunderstanding caused by a quick initial perusal highlighting the following passages:

Hemingway had a remarkable circle of friends and acquaintances, from literary figures and artists, to barmen and prostitutes, ...
This meant that Hemingway and Joyce could become friends. By the time the United States entered the war in December 1941, Joyce had been invited to many long dinners ... I was puzzled by all these references to ‘Joyce’, given that James Joyce died on 13 January 1941, a couple of weeks short of his 60th birthday. What I had missed was mention of the ‘American ambassador, and his subordinate, Robert P. Joyce’. So Hemingway had two friends called Joyce, but the writer was already dead by the time the diplomat arrived on the scene. I don’t suppose this mistaken identity troubled Miles Mathis, but it certainly troubled me for a moment, and it might puzzle other readers momentarily too.

The common feature of Hemingway, Joyce and Pound might be labelled ‘what it means to be a writer’. I have yet to post on what it meant for Joyce. We have notably seen independence and ambivalence in Joyce, and it turns out that despite their obvious differences, Hemingway’s character was somewhat similar. Independence: ‘A Spy Who Made His Own Way’; ‘although he undoubtedly has conspicuous ability for this type of work, he would be too much of an individualist to work under military supervision’. Ambivalence: ‘Hemingway’s attitude toward the OSS was typically ambivalent’; ‘”there was some question of the attitude of Mr. Hemingway to the FBI,” to include Hemingway’s signature on a denunciation of the FBI and his remark upon meeting Leddy for the first time that the FBI was “the American Gestapo.”’

One less flattering commonality with Joyce was noted by Hoover himself:

“Hemingway is the last man, in my estimation, to be used in any such capacity. His judgment is not of the best.” Hoover continued with an apparent expression of concern about Hemingway’s evident lack of sobriety in the past. Hoover was right: we have for once conclusive self-incriminating evidence from the horse’s mouth, for one of Joyce’s less attractive traits was that he drank like a fish. This kills two birds with one stone, since by the same token Joyce was clearly not suitable material either.

He [Joyce] really enjoyed drinking, and those nights when I’d bring him home after a protracted drinking bout, his wife, Nora, would open the door and say, “well, here comes James Joyce the author, drunk again with Ernest Hemingway.” (Gebler Davies, p.297) Coming to Hemingway’s politics as described in the same document, we find they are rather different – nay, opposed – to the objectionable face of the CIA taken over by a bunch of Nazis imported into the US after the war under Project Paperclip. Miles Mathis’s sole purpose in mentioning these writers’ alleged intelligence activity is to denounce them as pawns of the evil CIA, although the agency was only founded in 1947. Its ancestors may or may not have been evil – it is pure anachronism to presume so until those Nazis were brought in from 1945. And if it is not mere presumption, then what happened earlier? And when? ‘Someone posted a Wiki page’ is another blatant anachronism. I guess I shall have to provide a what and when of my own.

Here is Robert P. Joyce:

I suppose the reason why we got on so well was that we agreed in hating the same things such as Hitlerism, Marxist-Leninist totalitarian communism, … petty bourgeois conformity, and all abuses of state power to police and restrict human freedom. His ‘habitual stance of dislike and suspicion in all his dealings with civilian government officials and authority in general’ (non serviam?) elicited ‘reservations about Hemingway’s temperament and left-wing politics’, and the fact is that ‘during the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway had been a dedicated antifascist’, hence ‘more of a counterintelligence service than an intelligence service: Hemingway was to use his contacts in Havana [he was living in Cuba] to keep an eye out for Axis spies.’

Which bit of that does Miles Mathis object to, I wonder? It seems all very acceptable so far: if you were going to fight in World War II, fighting Nazism was the way to go. Even his mistrust of the FBI was similarly inspired, although also based on presumption and possibly over-generalization:

Hemingway believed that, because many FBI agents happened to be Roman Catholics, they were Franco sympathizers. He liked to refer to the FBI as “Franco’s Bastard Irish” and “Franco’s Iron Cavalry.” This brings us back to the English-speaking Irishman Joyce, who was a pacifist, or at least a non-combatant in neutral countries; when asked one time what he did during World War I, he answered ‘I wrote Ulysses, what did you do?’ Certainly he was not one of “Franco’s Bastard Irish”; interestingly, this is where the Irish American John Quinn comes in. In 1917 he published ‘An American Opinion’ on the Irish Home-Rule Convention, which makes an interesting read and presents its author in a rather different light than we get from Mathis. More on this in another post. The important point to be made right now is that had Hemingway come in contact with the later criminal CIA, he would surely have denounced it as the ‘Catholic Irish Army’ or the ‘Citizen Irish Army’ and given it a wide berth.

The distance between Hemingway and Joyce (Robert P.) is probably less than this. ‘Like many others, Joyce remembered Hemingway as “apolitical”: The leftist intellectuals…were angry… because he always refused to enter their “camp”…. [Hemingway said,] “I like communists when they’re soldiers but when they’re priests, I hate them.” He was always particularly contemptuous of the “ideology boys.”’ For since 1941, Hemingway had been working for the other side (NKVD) as well. This is not quite so surprising or illogical for an apolitical to be doing: ‘the other side’ is an oversimplification when there are at least three sides. He made a ‘passionate plea for communism because it was still the best hope for beating the Nazis’, fascism being ‘the one form of government that cannot produce good writers’ – this was enough to ensure his recruitment ‘on ideological grounds’ despite his subsequent ‘poor record as a Soviet spy’. In other words, Hemingway seems to have had a very active, political way of producing good writers; Joyce meanwhile simply got on with the job of being one.

A couple of war images will perhaps suffice to illustrate the difference between their two positions. Had he been British, Joyce’s position during World War I might have been somewhat akin to Wyndham Lewis sitting on the toilet while his unit was blown to smithereens: at once in the action and in relative safety; except that his eyesight was so poor he would probably not have been called up. Joyce was temperamentally unsuited to any kind of violence, and would surely have needed some incredible luck to survive. This was Joyce: another writer, Siegfried Sassoon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siegfried_Sassoon), showed incredible bravery before protesting against the war. Robert Graves was another writer who survived, Wilfrid Owen a poet who was killed: trench warfare was huge lottery whatever your occupation back home. Hence Hemingway’s ‘lost generation’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Generation) were not all simply disoriented; many others did vanish.
Hemingway, during World War II, while temperamentally too individualistic for military life, as we saw above, was temperamentally in his element in the hottest situations. While we don’t know what he actually did as a spy, we do know that he came ashore on D-Day on ‘Bloody Omaha’ Beach as a noncombatant (an unarmed reporter). Note how this and any war was/is also an information war. Nonetheless, his reporting can hardly be accused of the faults of embedded journalism: this was the one beach where the landing operation (the French rightly object to the word ‘invasion’) did not go at all to plan, on ‘the brink of disaster’ for most of the day and, as I recall, counting some 10,000 casualties by nightfall. Given these harrowing conditions – they say the opening scene of the movie Saving Private Ryan is an accurate portrayal – it would be churlish to criticize the quality of Hemingway’s writing. As it happens, there is nothing wrong with the quality of his writing. (Note, this might be presented as a defect in the story, but you cannot have it both ways: either he is a decent writer or a lousy writer – or again, maybe like Pound he forges a style in stressful circumstances.)

Those of our troops who were not wax-grey with sea-sickness, fighting it off, trying to hold on to themselves before they had to grab for the steel side of the boat, were watching the Texas with looks of surprise and happiness. Under the steel helmets they looked like pikemen of the Middle Ages to whose aid in battle had come some strange and unbelievable monster. There would be a flash like a blast furnace from the 14-inch guns of the Texas that would lick far out from the ship. Then the yellow brown smoke would cloud out and, with smoke rolling, the concussion and report would hit us, jarring the men's helmets. It struck your ear like the punch of a heavy, dry glove.
Then up on the green rise of a hill that now showed clearly as we moved in would spout two tall black fountains of earth and smoke.
“Look what they’re doing to those Germans,” I leaned forward to hear a G.I. say above the roar of the motor. “I guess there won’t be a man alive there,” he said happily.
That is the only thing I remember hearing a G.I. say all that morning.
(Warren Tute, John Costello, Terry Hughes, D-Day, London & Sydney, Pan Books, 1974, p.193-4)See here (http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-31/news/wr-64227_1_d-day-invasion).

Contrast this considerable bravery with Miles Mathis’s pitiful assessment based on guesswork (‘my guess’, ‘we must assume’) and a couple of photographs and his personal dislike for bullfighting (we have already seen how he detests his writing style):

I would go to the corrida only if I were guaranteed to see at least one overconfident famous person of the Hemingway sort come down out of the crowd and be gored to death. I almost got my wish here: [photo] That's him directly in front of the bull, we are told. My guess is Hemingway wasn't even a good boxer. Since all the rest is lies, and since he looks like a slow man with a short reach, we must assume the only men he could beat were other lumbering lummoxes like himself. I also don't believe he was six feet tall.Mathis likes to belittle people, literally in terms of feet and inches; he does the same for William James and Sigmund Freud. However, his denigration of Hemingway’s physique is also contradicted in the document he himself refers us to, by someone who actually met the man and had no axe to grind:

Another of the OSS officers Hemingway found excellent was David K. E. Bruce, a Virginia aristocrat who headed the organization’s operations in Europe and who after the war became a prominent diplomat [...] Bruce was usually more reserved, but he appears to have idolized Hemingway, describing him as “patriarchal, with his gray beard, imposing physique, much like God, as painted by Michelangelo.”Sure, Hemingway was ‘overconfident’ – he was an American for God’s sake! :) As the Brits used to say during the war, the Americans were ‘oversexed, overpaid and over here’. But it wasn’t all swagger. He was a complex character, i.e. not unreservedly ‘American’ – notably with respect to his politics – ambivalent in his methods, but single-minded in his anti-fascist goal. ‘American’ itself was an ambiguous notion even back then, depending on whether you were a veteran or part of the establishment. Two last quotes from ‘Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy’:

Hemingway had come to the attention of the NKVD as early as 1935, when he had written an article for the far-left American journal, The New Masses. The article was an angry denunciation of the US for leaving a large group of veterans, who were working in government service, to die in the path of a hurricane. The NKVD was pleasantly surprised by the ideology that seemed to underlie the article. [...]
Perhaps Hemingway eventually concluded that working with the KGB was not patriotic — by all accounts, he always thought of himself as a loyal American.

[araucaria]

Before I come to Joyce the writer, I need to address my suspicion that John Quinn himself may be getting a raw deal as well. Since he published a piece in 1917 – interestingly not about art, but on a political subject – ‘An American Opinion’ ‘on the Irish Home-Rule Convention’, it seems only fair to take a look at what the man has to say for himself, as concrete written testimony. It turns out that John Quinn, who died nine years before Hitler’s rise to power, was already a true anti-Nazi and American patriot.

I have not seen much of that from Mathis, and in ‘The Stolen Century’ he supplies no cross-links, perhaps leaving the reader to wade through his other material in search of something beyond the initial Wikipedia excerpt (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quinn_(collector):

Who is John Quinn? According to Wikipedia,
“He worked for British Intelligence services before, during and after World War I. In this role he acted as case officer for, among others, Aleister Crowley, who was an agent provocateur posing as an Irish nationalist in order to infiltrate anti-British groups of Irish and Germans in the United States.“ (I notice in passing that Quinn’s Armory Show was on the face of it more open-minded in intent than Mathis finds it, since Quinn said (quoting Wikipedia, emphasis mine): “it was time the American people had an opportunity to see and judge for themselves concerning the work of the Europeans who are creating a new art.” There may have been a subplot, but one thing the exhibition certainly achieved was to give the people that opportunity to make up their own minds without further mediation from Mr Quinn.)

The immediate question this raises is: what was this American doing working for British Intelligence? The answer is right there: the multipolarity of the war. Things are always more complex than they seem. Ireland was still part of the UK, although having sought independence for some time already. Hence the ‘anti-British groups of Irish’ were siding with the Germans, or at least taking advantage of the war between England and Germany to further the separatist cause. The presence of these ‘groups of Irish and Germans in the United States’ would then indeed be a security threat to the US, as an ally of Britain. And being anti-British made potential allies of the Irish and the Germans. (Notice how Hemingway’s mistrust, a quarter of a century later, of the Irish whose Catholic religion put them to his way of thinking, on the side of Franco, and indirectly of the Nazis, was historically well grounded.) (Notice also how Aleister Crowley can be safely left to one side here; as an ‘agent provocateur’, he was playing a role, which says nothing about who he really was, beyond serving the same cause in this instance.) Meanwhile, mere mention of his name serves to demonize the subject in advance and instead of scrutiny: an ‘agent provocateur’ on the very page...

What this means is that the pamphlet on the ‘Irish Question’, as it was called back then, likely opens an interesting window on the undercover work that John Quinn was doing for his country. The first chapter (‘An American’s War Credo’) deals with Germany. Quinn begins with some preliminary statements about belligerency and the reason for fighting this war. For convenience and a visual sample of the original document, I present the first two pages below. I am not going to quote the article at any great length; for the rest just follow the first of the external links at the end of the Wikipedia entry.

34693 34694

He goes on to explain, complete with quotes from the German press, how the entire nation is behind its leaders (e.g. Frankfurter Zeitung: ‘To Wilson the Imperial Government is the merciless dictator of Germany but he himself has to add that our nation is today at one with its government’ [p.11, Quinn’s emphasis]).

This rings true, because it is very much in line with what the depth psychologist C.G. Jung was saying about Germany’s collective psychosis post-World War II. Jung (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?80742-Fitts-and-Farrell-Secret-Space-Program-Conference-San-Mateo-2014&p=944068&viewfull=1#post944068)also describes how “… the demons will seek a new victim. And that won’t be difficult. Every man who loses his shadow, every nation that falls into self-righteousness, is their prey.” What we see is that John Quinn in 1917 was describing – and already fighting – an early stage of the German disease. We will see below how he was in fact seeking to immunize his own people against becoming the ‘new victim’: for Jung may not have realized at the time, but he was referring to America See how Paul Levy updates his analysis for the US in the George W Bush era in The Madness of George W Bush. Links here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?85903-Anomalies-in-The-Ruiner-s-material&p=1008970&viewfull=1#post1008970).

This also rings true when we consider not just the pro-German Irish in the US but the Germans as well; we are not talking about down-and-out terrorists, we are talking about affluent German bankers such as the Warburgs, against a backdrop of widespread pro-German sentiment in the US way back in 1915-16. Hence John Quinn is very much in line with that anti-Warburg, Aby Warburg, who before his mental health scare was organizing antiwar demonstrations. (The family biographer Ron Chernow (see above) focuses on his pro-German stance against the uncivilized Anglo-Saxons. This was undoubtedly part of it, but on its own it fails to explain his mental issues, which were surely due to massive cognitive dissonance.) Another of his antiwar activities involved collecting thousands of press cuttings (c. 25k): it occurs to me that Quinn’s source for his quotes from the German press might be... Aby Warburg himself. (While I am at it, these two would be a very good possible source for Ezra Pound’s interest in financial hanky-panky as well). I want to quote a page of my Warburg essay setting this all out, beginning with a lengthy quote from Eustace Mullins.


The Rothschilds were wary of Germany’s ability to continue in the war, despite the financial chaos caused by their agents, the Warburgs, who were financing the Kaiser, and Paul Warburg’s brother, Max, who, as head of the German Secret Service, authorized Lenin’s train to pass through the lines and execute the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. (p. 146) […]
Paul Warburg was in control of the nation’s banking system*.
* NOTE: New York Times, August 10, 1918; ‘Mr. (Paul) Warburg was the author of the plan organizing the War Finance Corporation.’
Knowing that the overwhelming sentiment of the American people during 1915 and 1916 had been anti-British and pro-German, our British allies viewed with some trepidation the prominence of Paul Warburg and Kuhn, Loeb Company in the prosecution of the war. They were uneasy about his high position in the Administration because his brother, Max Warburg, was at that time serving as head of the German Secret Service. On December 12, 1918, the United States Naval Secret Service Report on Mr. Warburg was as follows:
‘WARBURG, PAUL: New York City. German, naturalized citizen, 1911, was decorated by the Kaiser in 1912, was vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. Handled large sums furnished by Germany for Lenin and Trotsky. Has a brother who is leader of the espionage system of Germany.’
Strangely enough, this report, which must have been compiled much earlier, while we were at war with Germany, is not dated until December 12, 1918. AFTER the Armistice had been signed. Also, it does not contain the information that Paul Warburg resigned from the Federal Reserve Board in May, 1918, which indicates that it was compiled before May, 1918, when Paul Warburg would theoretically have been open to a charge of treason because of his brother’s control of Germany’s Secret Service (p. 150–1). On page 44, Mullins tells how he personally witnessed (albeit indirectly) the exposing of ‘the Warburg connection with the Communist spy ring in Washington’. It is therefore my contention that the espionage/counter-espionage business, going hand in hand with secrecy, was a homegrown affair of which Aby himself would have been an unwitting agent as an outsider with an insider’s view—or maybe not so unwitting: did this independent observer end up becoming a private investigator? Interestingly, when Aby’s library was transferred out of Nazi Germany to London late in 1933, with a ‘total news blackout’ imposed on the move, two thousand books related to World War I had to be left behind (Chernow, p. 406)—a ‘minor concession’, maybe; more likely, this material was too sensitive for release to a former and possibly future enemy. Such being the case, perhaps the sanatorium was a something of a blessing in disguise, a lesser of two ills, taking him out of harm’s way. The trouble was that the patient did not respond too well to this treatment.The following from Mullins bears repeating: ‘our British allies viewed with some trepidation the prominence of Paul Warburg and Kuhn, Loeb Company in the prosecution of the war’. It tells us why John Quinn would be working for the British: hardly treasonous, just the opposite in fact – they were America’s allies after all, alerting America to the spread of the contagion to the US. Having cleared up this source of puzzlement to my own satisfaction at least, my next question becomes, What does all this have to do with the Irish? And a subsidiary question: What does all this have to do with James Joyce, who left Ireland for good in voluntary exile in October 1904?

The answer to the former question lies in the broader context of Irish patriots seeking to leverage the war to gain independence from England, a dangerous thing to attempt, but the Irish Question was a intractable issue of long standing. Back in early 1903, Joyce was quoting himself about the ‘true patriots, who are beginning to speak a little vaguely about their friends the French’ (Joyce Letters, p.13). The French, the Germans: seemingly it did not much matter where help came from. But when it came to the Germans in their present mood, the dangerous tipping point that Quinn and others would be working against was the act of treason if ever the Irish actually sided with the enemy ‘German conspirators’.

Quinn’s second chapter is titled ‘Sinn Fein and the Dublin insurrection’ (better known as the Easter Rising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_Rising)). He speaks of Irish ‘ideality’ (i.e. idealism: dreams of an Irish republic), to be ‘distinguished sharply from the very few pro-German Irish and from the ordinary ruck of politicians, past, present and to come, who think that hatred of England is statesmanship, and who have the one vulgarity in common, a belief in Irish hatred of the English and in English hatred of the Irish’ (p.27). He mentions how the Irish (Sinn Fein) seem to place their interest (independence) ahead of winning the war against Germany, forgetting that a German victory would not be good for Ireland. He quotes a piece of fiction about what Ireland would be like under German rule.

Strikes are punished by deportation to Berlin and it is of course “verboten” to use the Irish language. It is dead. The Sinn Feiners who were caught plotting against Germany were, as a precautionary measure, sent as exiles to the shores of the Baltic.
[...]
General Baron von Kartoffel [=Potato, i.e. German for Murphy] visits the Cork slums and has the inmates of the lunatic asylum “gassed”, the remains cremated, clean sheets put on the beds, and the slum population, escorted by soldiers, moved in. Strangely enough, they showed no gratitude. The picture of Prussianizing Ireland is an amusing one. But I would not have it believed that hotheaded Sinn Feiners or a few irreconcilable Irishmen in America represent the general Irish feeling in this war. The gassing of mental patients is eerily premonitory, as this was the treatment handed out to inmates at Hartheim Castle near Mauthausen concentration camp in the 1940s. Quinn goes on to explain how, “pragmatically” speaking, pacifists are pro-German. Since he quotes William James (unfortunately another in Mathis’s crosshairs, not just for his diminutive stature), he is here referring to Jamesian pragmatism, something I often do myself: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=1027584&viewfull=1#post1027584
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?87260-Excellent--encompassing--recent-presentation-by-Greer&p=1027519&viewfull=1#post1027519
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?85752-Helen-They-ve-been-around-for-thousands-of-years&p=1006734&viewfull=1#post1006734
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=668480&viewfull=1#post668480
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?54731-What-is-Truth&p=622591&viewfull=1#post622591
However the crux of the matter lies in the way the British government reacted to the Easter Rising – much more harshly, one notes in passing, than the fictitious Prussian reaction:

From the Irish point of view, as distinct from what I term the international point of view, the British government in executing these sixteen leaders and putting their names on the roll of martyrdom has not injured the cause of home rule, while the men themselves by their ideality and death have enormously advanced it.This was not the first big mistake: Quinn also points to Germany’s ‘bloodless victory’ in Ireland whereby it took up to 100,000 British soldiers out of the firing line to police the country, ‘too costly a price for her [England’s] past bungling in Ireland’.

That James quote starts Chapter IV, ‘The American Point of View’, with Quinn highlighting what James describes as one of the nation’s ‘habits’. James: ‘the habit of trained and disciplined good temper towards the opposite party when it fairly wins its innings. It was by breaking away from this habit that the Slave States nearly wrecked our Nation.’ Quinn: ‘Americans (i.e. ‘all sections and all varieties of people in the United States’) sympathize with Ireland because they feel “she had fairly won her innings” and had been deprived of her innings.’ In other words, Quinn sympathizes with the pro-Irish to the extent that there is nothing un-American about being so, au contraire. He obviously feels comfortable about being an Irish American himself.

He goes on to describe how Ireland became a political football for the English Tory party:

The Tories and the financiers backed and financed Ulster [protestant unionist Northern Ireland] (...) not because they loved Ulster (...) but because they wanted to get the Liberals out and the Tories in.
(...)
Many people forget that the Buckingham Palace conference over the home rule question, which resulted in stalemate, ended July 24-25, 1914, and that England and Germany were at war August 4, 1914. It is believed in the United States that Germany would not have forced the war if she had believed that England would come in; that Germany felt that England would not come in largely because of the Ulster business, and of what was believed in Germany to be general treason and disaffection in the English army; and that therefore the Carsons, the Lansdownes, the Londonderrys, the Selbournes and the others have a heavy responsibility for the war. If that belief is unfounded, still it is a belief.To summarize: if I understand this correctly, there seems to have been a misunderstanding of the stalemate: for the Germans, it meant that the British were still busy with Ireland and therefore would not fight; for the British, it meant that they could put the Irish question on the back burner and go to war with Germany. Meanwhile for the Irish, home rule was still very much at the top of the agenda, to be taken forward in these vastly more favourable conditions. This is how Ireland may have been not so much a sideshow or byproduct of the war as a trigger, and not just a trigger: it upset the natural balance of power more in Germany’s favour; as such, it would evidently be a major cause for concern for the Allies. And sorting out the mess would be a major contribution to the war effort, equivalent to 100,000 men on the ground, as we saw.

I turn now to where James Joyce fits in this picture. Geographically speaking, nowhere; intellectually speaking, busy writing Ulysses since March 1914. According to Richard Ellmann (Joyce Letters, p.39):

The outbreak of the first World War did not at first affect Joyce or his brother much. Joyce continued to give private lessons and to teach classes at a commercial high school in Trieste. But in January 1915 Stanislaus Joyce was interned, and after the Italian declaration of war in May of that year, Joyce knew he had better leave. With the help of friends he secured permission to go to Switzerland, on condition that he promise to take no part in the war. At the end of June 1915 he and his family were allowed to leave by train for Zurich.Joyce stayed in Zurich until late 1919. If he was spying for John Quinn, he would have had to have broken his promise and stayed under the radar of the neutral Swiss. What use he would be to Quinn in either Italy or Switzerland is not immediately apparent, as a spy at least: but, as I hinted earlier, perhaps as an unwitting informant, through his writings. I suggested that earlier in an offhand way; now let’s see how this might actually work. Quinn’s Chapter III gives the ‘English View’, notably by quoting at length a not unsympathetic writer, starting with the phrase ‘The murder of Mr Sheehy-Skeffington and his companions was a sheer stroke of ill-fortune for England...’ He is at his most scathing of English hypocrisy in the passage quoted below. Note: English hypocrisy has become a stereotype, which does not make it automatically false (or true): we have to examine each individual case to see where the notion came from in the first place.

It is an awkward moment for a nation which has been publicly thanking God that it is not as other nations are, that it is no tyrant but the protector of the oppressed, no wicked Prussian militarist but the enemy of militarism, when it suddenly becomes suspect of the very crimes which it has set with a flourish of trumpets to punish other races for committing. At the outbreak of the revolt we held all the cards, the sympathy was all with us. But not even the Germans could have played a hand more clumsily. After two years of war, even the man in the street was capable of reflecting that there must be ‘something behind’ the outbreak. And from this it was but a step to speculating what that something could be. In a little while the alarming news came through that the executed rebels were not mere thieves and murderers in the pay of Germany, but schoolmasters and poets of blameless private lives, idealists, abstemious, self-denying men, deeply religious.
[...] The Irish possess essential qualities which the English lack. They are to my mind the salt of the British peoples, the invaluable leaven without which the Anglo-Saxon would grow ever more lumpy. Quinn himself mentions Padraic (Patrick) Pearse (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Pearse), the leader of the revolt, whose writings were just being published. ‘Not a single thought’, he says, can be found that is unworthy or ignoble’ (p.49). My purpose in mentioning these names is that they were people personally known to Joyce. Skeffington was a fellow student with whom he had collaborated on a literary project; when he invited Joyce to his house the latter refused. Joyce called him ‘Hairy Jaysus’ as he portrayed him in Stephen Hero as ‘a serious young feminist called McCann (...) The students of the college did not understand what manner of ideas he favoured and they considered that they rewarded his originality sufficiently by calling him “Knickerbockers” (footnote in Joyce Letters, p.53). Skeffington was a pacifist who on trying to prevent some poor people looting was killed by a British officer who was later declared insane (Ellmann Vol 2, p.20), although Wikipedia contradicts this with a more complex, more highly motivated account of an execution (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Sheehy-Skeffington)). Pearse Joyce did not like after dropping out of his Irish language class because Pearse unacceptably glorified Irish by denigrating English.

The bottom line is that Joyce had put some distance between himself and persons of interest to the intelligence service and indeed between himself and his native Ireland – and indeed some time, writing in wartime about a day in 1904. No wonder John Quinn did not like his manuscripts: they would have been singularly unhelpful with respect to the Irish Citizen Army (http://www.theirishstory.com/2013/11/04/the-formation-of-the-irish-citizen-army-1913-16/#.WEQiv0DvfL0) (ICA) responsible for the Easter Rising. There is a character in Ulysses called ‘the citizen’ who is an out-and-out bigot (Joyce’s answer to Homer’s one-eyed giant Cyclops); in another post I shall be analyzing this episode in a demonstration of how Quinn-through-Joyce also fails in the alleged attempt to kill off the novel. No wonder either, then, that a doubtless doubly disappointed John Quinn sold off all his Joyceana before his death in 1924. To be honest, I feel rather the same way about Miles Mathis’s story about the writer-spy and his handler.

There is one loose end in this whole saga that I cannot tie up, namely this reference in the above Wikipedia entry for the Easter Rising: ‘Germany agreed to send an arms shipment to the rebels, but the British had intercepted it just before the Rising began.’ Which is expanded into ‘The Aud and the U-19 reached the coast of Kerry on Good Friday, 21 April. This was earlier than the Volunteers expected and so none were there to meet the vessels. The Royal Navy had known about the arms shipment and intercepted the Aud [a German naval vessel ‘disguised as a Norwegian ship’], prompting the captain to scuttle the ship.’ There are quite a few details supplied about this that need checking. This is important, being the one instance of what I described as the dangerous tipping point of treasonously siding with the enemy (the use of ‘1871 Mausers’ hardly counts any more than the use of an AK-47 is today a sign of alignment with Russia). Not only does it go against Quinn’s whole presentation of the situation (the likely accuracy of which I have explained), it is unfortunately in so many respects a non-event: an arms shipment arriving too soon, intercepted on the basis of a report over which someone at Naval Intelligence ‘was doubtful about its accuracy’, and sent to the bottom of the sea before anyone could show up to collect the weapons; for all we know, it might have been a Norwegian ship disguised as a German naval vessel disguised as a Norwegian ship: the outward appearance would have been the same. It might never have existed at all. In other words, the incident bears all the hallmarks of a ‘false flag’ event whose purpose would be to discredit the rebels as traitors. I am not saying that is what it was; but it certainly gives us pause. Nothing may have happened at all; no doubt the evidence is out there, but at this stage, I simply have no way of knowing.

[araucaria]

Nearly done :)
I come now to the accusation levelled at Joyce that he was a ‘Modernist’ – i.e. for Mathis a fake: ‘For me, “Modern” is synonymous with “fake.”’ (The Stolen Century) – who sought to kill off the novel in order to cut off the subversion of Dickens. ‘What the dickhuns!’ exclaims someone in Finnegans Wake, a novel full of elaborate punning. If that is what he was trying to do, then he was an abysmal failure, for he has spawned generations of imitators, up to and including only the other day. (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/nov/09/single-sentence-novel-mike-mccormack-solar-bones-wins-goldsmiths-prize-books) The idea of writing a single sentence novel is NOT new. Claude Simon’s Histoire (1967) springs immediately to this writer’s mind. The 1985 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Simon "who in his novels combines the poet's and the painter's creativeness with a deepened awareness of time in the depiction of the human condition". See here (http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1985/).
But the original nonstop stream-of-consciousness prose was the final chapter of Ulysses: Molly Bloom’s fifty-plus-page monologue, just one of many stylistic innovations that later writers have borrowed/imitated while making innovations of their own (or not). (Actually Joyce was not quite the first: he got the idea from a little-known short story by Edouard Dujardin, Les lauriers sont coupés. But he didn’t steal it; he brought Dujardin into the limelight to take the credit he deserved.) Another stylistic offering is the last chapter but one, in a question-and-answer format reminiscent of the Catholic catechism. A long novel by Robert Pinget, L’Inquisitoire (1962), starts with the question ‘oui ou non répondez’ (answer yes or no), combining this format with the inner monologue and starting with the word ‘yes’ that is Joyce’s end point. Both these writers belong to the French nouveau roman (New Novel), which is one major 20th century novel form explicitly acknowledging a debt to Joyce, and which in turn inspired many other innovative writers. You cannot tell me Joyce killed the novel when there is so much post-Joycean fiction to work with! I was going to say don’t get me started; but it is far too late for that :) See these posts, which are indicative of these writers’ relevance to what we are trying to achieve at Avalon
Alain Robbe-Grillet: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?84625-Corey-Goode-s-claim-of-time-regression&p=990542&viewfull=1#post990542 http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?84625-Corey-Goode-s-claim-of-time-regression&p=991210&viewfull=1#post991210
Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=564868&viewfull=1#post564868
Georges Perec: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?84692-Proof-of-time-travel-by-Jane-Tripp&p=1014637&viewfull=1#post1014637
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?66011-The-Hitler-Speech-They--Don-t--Want-You-To-Hear..-&p=773827&viewfull=1#post773827
Perec, Butor, Thomas Mann: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?67668-Courtney-Brown-Announcement-for-February--now-March--2014&p=806737&viewfull=1#post806737
Claude Ollier: http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=895061&viewfull=1#post895061
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=898478&viewfull=1#post898478
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?78782-Charlie-Hebdo-shooting-eleven-dead-at-Paris-offices-of-satirical-magazine&p=921607&viewfull=1#post921607
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?54731-What-is-Truth&p=622591&viewfull=1#post622591

To return to the vocabulary I used earlier, these authors are Joycean artists, not story-tellers. In contrast, I still need to explain why these 20th century writers are actually not Joycean, but post-Joycean; briefly here, it is because story-telling did not stop with Joyce: he is a story-telling artist, and story-telling and artistry have continued to evolve since. Since I announced a dozen posts: that particular... story will turn them into a baker’s dozen. I first need to establish the artistry in Joyce.

Claude Simon’s Nobel citation correctly refers to the time aspect in his work, which is something we don’t always think about in literature generally, although it is indeed crucial to literature as art. Here is a quote from Stephen Hero, Joyce’s first draft of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

– So you admit you are an Irishman after all and not one of the red garrison.
– Of course I do.
– And don’t you think that every Irishman worthy of the name should be able to speak his native tongue?
– I really don’t know.
– And don’t you think that we as a race have a right to be free?
– O, don’t ask me such questions, Madden. You can use these phrases of the platform but I can’t.
– But surely you have some political opinions, man!
– I am going to think them out. I am an artist, don’t you see? Do you believe that I am?
– O, yes, I know you are.
– Very well then, how the devil can you expect me to settle everything all at once? Give me time. (Stephen Hero, Granada, 1982, p.54) The oral tradition of the bard Homer, the original story-teller (not a writer at all), has two main features: on the one hand, a love of florid epithets (rosy-fingered Dawn, aegis-bearing Zeus....); on the other a love for an action-packed story: the oral ancestor of the ‘page-turner’. Between the two there is nothing: zero description. If Homer wants to tell us about Achilles’ shield, he recounts how his father, the god Hephaistos, made it: first this, then that, then the other. I would go as far as to suggest that the gods are an integral art of this process. Julian Jaynes’ theory of the bicameral mind (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)) presents them as an inner voice inciting men to act. I am thinking that the conceptualization faculty required for embracing simultaneity and hence description only came later.
In other words, for Homer, time keeps flowing: he is incapable of taking in a complex object with simultaneous parts such as a shield. Everything becomes a story. This is not necessarily naive. When Gustave Flaubert, a contemporary of Dickens, lingers over a school cap or a cake in Madame Bovary (1857), he uses time references such as ‘then’ in passing from one detail to another because although the object is outside of time, in the sense of ‘all there simultaneously’, our perception of it takes time: the eyes focus on this and then on that detail; we cannot take it in all at once without folding it back into the blanket concept of naming something, here ‘shield’ (recall how this is where Adam starts the process, simply naming things).

Time is always an element of narrative: there is no fixed correlation between the two. In another novel, Sentimental Education (1869), Flaubert spends hundreds of pages on the day-to-day existence of his hero, then in the space of a sentence he mentions a three-year spell away travelling. The effect produced is striking: somewhat like extreme foreshortening in perspective art. The same effect is at play in a different way in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days: now Jules Verne (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?81354-Reclaiming-the-neutral-middle-ground&p=1117057&viewfull=1#post1117057) is a story-teller. The story is about cutting down time, and the author cuts down eighty days of travelling into a few hours’ read, notably by cutting out the endless hours of boredom sitting in a train or on a ship, eating, drinking sleeping, going to the bathroom etc. etc. In this regard, notice Joyce’s slow pace in his final two novels: the action of Ulysses takes place over a single day; Finnegans Wake encapsulates the whole of human history in a single night’s dream.

Stream-of-consciousness/inner monologue – which, remember, is only one of a number of narrative techniques used by Joyce – is an attempt at matching the pace of thought to the pace of reading (although notice how the pace of composition is typically very much slower for a careful writer). It is not unconnected to the automatic writing of surrealism, since, as we all know and understand, what passes through our mind is never elevated thoughts for very long. In this regard, Joyce’s prose is not ‘fake’ ‘modernism’: it is precisely a denunciation of the fakery of the elevated discourse of the traditional novel for example – or more simply, it is a rejection of its artificiality: ‘such is life in the outhouse’. Joyce actually has two types of stream-of-consciousness: in addition to the above feminine version, the masculine type is used for Molly’s husband, Leopold Bloom, in terse sentences of often just a few words, sometimes one word or less. It may be that Hemingway borrowed his clipped style from Joyce, adding the macho component totally, but totally, lacking in Bloom.

When Joyce does this oh so placidly with Leopold Bloom, nothing is wasted and we accompany him to the cemetery and to a maternity ward (death and birth), noble themes with both noble and not so lofty thoughts opn the way, and other less dignified moments all the way to his backyard loo. Applying this principle to the here and now, I am thinking right now that the word ‘loo’ seems to come from ‘Waterloo’ (as the French for loo is ‘les water[-closet]’), but actually this etymology is back to front; in Edinburgh they used to empty their chamberpots out the window (whatever floor they were on) with a shout of ‘gardy loo’ (regardez l’eau) originally meaning Watch out for the water! So we have a nice little knot there, water= loo, except that in Middle Dutch, loo = sacred forest – a blessed tangle: exactly what I am driving at :)

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it's not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive. One tabloid of cascara sagrada. Life might be so. It did not move or touch him but it was something quick and neat. Print anything now. Silly season. He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell. Neat certainly. Matcham often thinks of the masterstroke by which he won the laughing witch who now. Begins and ends morally. Hand in hand. Smart. He glanced back through what he had read and, while feeling his water flow quietly, he envied kindly Mr Beaufoy who had written it and received payment of three pounds, thirteen and six. [...] He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it.Claude Simon once wrote ‘chaque mot est un noeud de significations’ (in Orion Aveugle, Eds Skira, 1970): every word is a knot/node/nexus of meanings. This is where writing as art (Joyce) veers away from story-telling: the one has a self-referential component focussing on the medium (technique); the other regards the medium as being totally transparent: Homer was not a writer at all (an oral poet who never put pen to paper), and Dickens a hundred years after his time might have been a broadcaster. (He actually did a lucrative speaking tour in the US (http://charlesdickenspage.com/america.html) with 76 performances reading from his novels. Mark Twain’s assessment (http://charlesdickenspage.com/twain_on_dickens.html), although harsher than the rest of the press, found some qualities amid defects that sound like a mixture of Englishness and tiredness.) On the other hand, writing as art means that the medium is part of the message. Nowadays we have Internet writers who need to understand that their writing too is an art... That is James Joyce’s and others’ legacy to the 21st century; the survival or otherwise of the novel as a genre per se is immaterial since it is possible to claim that legacy, say as an anonymous poster on a discussion forum – which is precisely what I am doing. :)

The point is that eliminating bodily waste is a part of life like any other, a vital function in fact, much more important than say watching TV. Joyce was writing in wartime, when he may have heard about its life-saving role for Wyndham Lewis (see Ezra Pound’s poem above), or for one of a thousand others who must have had the same experience. Dropping a titanic turd is no less divinely alive (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?53288-Why-Laughter-is-the-Best-Weapon-Against-the-Moral-Idiocy-of-the-Controllers&p=895864&viewfull=1#post895864) than anything else, of which dropping a bomb is no more than a ghastly caricature. Hence a copy of Titbits is for Bloom’s eyes as well as for his arse. His thought, meanwhile, is: ‘The sh!t people write! And make good money for it!’ This leads us into an example of how Joyce weaves his narrative into a tapestry – what is known in literary theory as text (the word itself being of course a textile analogy, as is Claude Simon’s knot... and Mathis’s ‘pile of yarn’... and, by association only, Bloom’s piles (haemorrhoids). It also offers a micro-instance of his attachment to Vico's principle of cyclical history (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Science) inasmuch as the recycling of manure is already on his mind on the way to relieve himself:

He bent down to regard a lean file of spearmint growing by the wall. Make a summerhouse here. Scarlet runners. Virginia creepers. Want to manure the whole place over, scabby soil. A coat of liver of sulphur. All soil like that without dung. Household slops. Loam, what is this that is? The hens in the next garden: their droppings are very good top dressing. Best of all though are the cattle, especially when they are fed on those oilcakes. Mulch of dung. Best thing to clean ladies' kid gloves. Dirty cleans. Ashes too. Reclaim the whole place. Grow peas in that corner there. Lettuce. Always have fresh greens then. Still gardens have their drawbacks. That bee or bluebottle here Whitmonday. The arsewipe recalls a famous page of Rabelais (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gargantua/Chapter_XIII), whose posterior motive I discuss here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?53288-Why-Laughter-is-the-Best-Weapon-Against-the-Moral-Idiocy-of-the-Controllers&p=895864&viewfull=1#post895864). In modern art, you have Piero Manzoni’s Mierda de artista (http://www.pieromanzoni.org/EN/works_****.htm), the artist’s canned excrement. See my post here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=883524&viewfull=1#post883524). Now that might be a useful work to discuss with reference to fakery. For one thing, weight is the only indicator of the actual content of the cans; for another, if you used a can opener to verify the title, you would destroy the work. But the possible fakery is only the symptom of something else: inasmuch as it negates the crucial above-described recycling process, the work marks a constipated end point, whereas non-fakery, i.e. creativity or originality, is all about open-ended process. Contrast Duchamp’s Fountain I discuss here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?91692-Soft-underbellies&p=1079345&viewfull=1#post1079345). It describes a particular state of mind vaguely similar to that of standing in a museum in front of a picture, such as a Manet (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?93755-Multi-dimensionality-lecture&p=1105090&viewfull=1#post1105090), with its extension of perspective to include the viewer.

This talk of human waste – bodily and written, inextricably combined as used toilet paper – takes us all the way to the human outcast. Later that day, Bloom has a newspaper which someone wants to borrow to see the horse-racing page (it is Gold Cup day). He gives him the paper, saying he was about to throw it away anyway (i.e. like a piece of ‘bumf’). This is taken as a racing tip for a reason that the reader does not understand at this stage. It is only later that we learn that a rank outsider called Throwaway won the race at 20/1. In this subsequent scene, in the pub, Bloom, who is a Jew (Blum), momentarily absents himself. It is suggested that he is off to collect his winnings, leading to an antisemitic episode led by a character called ‘the citizen’, who chases him off the premises hurling an empty biscuit tin at him. As a reworking of the episode in Homer when the Cyclops hurls a rock at the escaping Ulysses, this suggests a whole new reverse angle on the one-eyed monster. First the throwaway wins the race (‘takes the biscuit’ – hence the empty tin), and the outcast, the wandering Jew (here a travelling salesman) is expected to pick up the winnings without buying a round of drinks. In actual fact, the whole financial aspect is totally lost on Bloom (but not on these gentiles), Bloom who preaches love and prompts the citizen to demonstrate how being a Jew makes a ‘Christian’ outcast of Jesus who, as I recall, said to his disciples, ‘Have you never read in the Scriptures: "'The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone”’.

I want to quote this passage at some length, partly because it is pretty funny, but mostly because I am wondering what aspect someone like Miles Mathis would object to as the destructive work of an intelligence asset as opposed to the positive work of a subversive writer like Dickens. Has he read it at all? I doubt it. The world is upside down indeed when it becomes subversive for a Jew to practise what Christians only preach, especially when Joyce himself was neither. The salient point however is that John Quinn would be looking disappointedly for political intelligence, and out of the entire 600 pages this was the best that Joyce could come up with. Of course, that was only to be expected, since although writing in wartime, as I indicated, he was harking back to the time in 1904 when he was still a Dubliner, 16th June to be precise (aka Bloomsday). Put yourself in Quinn’s place: looking for info about gentlemen like Pearse and Sheehy-Skeffington, and having to wade through the bigotry of ‘the citizen’, turned inside out like a glove as he blasphemes to denounce a supposed blasphemer.

(Note on old English money and its colloquial names: a ‘tanner’ is sixpence; a ‘bob’ is a shilling, or twice sixpence; half a crown is two shillings and sixpence. A ‘quid’ is a pound, or twenty shillings. Hence Bloom’s alleged five bob bet at 20/1 would have won him five quid. One of the jokes here is Boylan losing badly after betting ‘for himself and a lady friend’, since Bloom knows that at that very moment he is with the lady friend in question... Mrs Bloom!)

—What's up with you, says I to Lenehan. You look like a fellow that had lost a bob and found a tanner.
—Gold cup, says he.
—Who won, Mr Lenehan? says Terry.
—Throwaway, says he, at twenty to one. A rank outsider. And the rest nowhere.
—And Bass's mare? says Terry.
—Still running, says he. We're all in a cart. Boylan plunged two quid on my tip Sceptre for himself and a lady friend.
—I had half a crown myself, says Terry, on Zinfandel that Mr Flynn gave me. Lord Howard de Walden's.
—Twenty to one, says Lenehan. Such is life in an outhouse. Throwaway, says he. Takes the biscuit, and talking about bunions. Frailty, thy name is Sceptre.
So he went over to the biscuit tin Bob Doran left to see if there was anything he could lift on the nod, the old cur after him backing his luck with his mangy snout up. Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard.
—Not there, my child, says he.
—Keep your pecker up, says Joe. She'd have won the money only for the other dog.
And J. J. and the citizen arguing about law and history with Bloom sticking in an odd word.
—Some people, says Bloom, can see the mote in others' eyes but they can't see the beam in their own.
—Raimeis, says the citizen. There's no-one as blind as the fellow that won't see, if you know what that means. Where are our missing twenty millions of Irish should be here today instead of four, our lost tribes? And our potteries and textiles, the finest in the whole world! And our wool that was sold in Rome in the time of Juvenal and our flax and our damask from the looms of Antrim and our Limerick lace, our tanneries and our white flint glass down there by Ballybough and our Huguenot poplin that we have since Jacquard de Lyon and our woven silk and our Foxford tweeds and ivory raised point from the Carmelite convent in New Ross, nothing like it in the whole wide world. Where are the Greek merchants that came through the pillars of Hercules, the Gibraltar now grabbed by the foe of mankind, with gold and Tyrian purple to sell in Wexford at the fair of Carmen? Read Tacitus and Ptolemy, even Giraldus Cambrensis. Wine, peltries, Connemara marble, silver from Tipperary, second to none, our farfamed horses even today, the Irish hobbies, with king Philip of Spain offering to pay customs duties for the right to fish in our waters. What do the yellowjohns of Anglia owe us for our ruined trade and our ruined hearths? And the beds of the Barrow and Shannon they won't deepen with millions of acres of marsh and bog to make us all die of consumption?
[...]
—But it's no use, says he. Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.
—What? says Alf.
—Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred. I must go now, says he to John Wyse. Just round to the court a moment to see if Martin is there. If he comes just say I'll be back in a second. Just a moment.
Who's hindering you? And off he pops like greased lightning.
—A new apostle to the gentiles, says the citizen. Universal love.
—Well, says John Wyse. Isn't that what we're told. Love your neighbour.
—That chap? says the citizen. Beggar my neighbour is his motto. Love, moya! He's a nice pattern of a Romeo and Juliet.
Love loves to love love. Nurse loves the new chemist. Constable 14A loves Mary Kelly. Gerty MacDowell loves the boy that has the bicycle. M. B. loves a fair gentleman. Li Chi Han lovey up kissy Cha Pu Chow. Jumbo, the elephant, loves Alice, the elephant. Old Mr Verschoyle with the ear trumpet loves old Mrs Verschoyle with the turnedin eye. The man in the brown macintosh loves a lady who is dead. His Majesty the King loves Her Majesty the Queen. Mrs Norman W. Tupper loves officer Taylor. You love a certain person. And this person loves that other person because everybody loves somebody but God loves everybody.
—Well, Joe, says I, your very good health and song. More power, citizen.
[...]
I was just looking around to see who the happy thought would strike when be damned but in he comes again letting on to be in a hell of a hurry.
—I was just round at the courthouse, says he, looking for you. I hope I'm not...
—No, says Martin, we're ready.
Courthouse my eye and your pockets hanging down with gold and silver. Mean bloody scut. Stand us a drink itself. Devil a sweet fear! There's a jew for you! All for number one. Cute as a ****house rat. Hundred to five.
—Don't tell anyone, says the citizen,
—Beg your pardon, says he.
—Come on boys, says Martin, seeing it was looking blue. Come along now.
—Don't tell anyone, says the citizen, letting a bawl out of him. It's a secret.
And the bloody dog woke up and let a growl.
—Bye bye all, says Martin.
And he got them out as quick as he could, Jack Power and Crofton or whatever you call him and him in the middle of them letting on to be all at sea and up with them on the bloody jaunting car.
—Off with you, says Martin to the jarvey.
The milkwhite dolphin tossed his mane and, rising in the golden poop the helmsman spread the bellying sail upon the wind and stood off forward with all sail set, the spinnaker to larboard. A many comely nymphs drew nigh to starboard and to larboard and, clinging to the sides of the noble bark, they linked their shining forms as doth the cunning wheelwright when he fashions about the heart of his wheel the equidistant rays whereof each one is sister to another and he binds them all with an outer ring and giveth speed to the feet of men whenas they ride to a hosting or contend for the smile of ladies fair. Even so did they come and set them, those willing nymphs, the undying sisters. And they laughed, sporting in a circle of their foam: and the bark clave the waves.
But begob I was just lowering the heel of the pint when I saw the citizen getting up to waddle to the door, puffing and blowing with the dropsy, and he cursing the curse of Cromwell on him, bell, book and candle in Irish, spitting and spatting out of him and Joe and little Alf round him like a leprechaun trying to peacify him.
—Let me alone, says he.
And begob he got as far as the door and they holding him and he bawls out of him:
—Three cheers for Israel!
Arrah, sit down on the parliamentary side of your arse for Christ' sake and don't be making a public exhibition of yourself. Jesus, there's always some bloody clown or other kicking up a bloody murder about bloody nothing. Gob, it'd turn the porter sour in your guts, so it would.
And all the ragamuffins and ****s of the nation round the door and Martin telling the jarvey to drive ahead and the citizen bawling and Alf and Joe at him to whisht and he on his high horse about the jews and the loafers calling for a speech and Jack Power trying to get him to sit down on the car and hold his bloody jaw and a loafer with a patch over his eye starts singing If the man in the moon was a jew, jew, jew and a **** shouts out of her:
—Eh, mister! Your fly is open, mister!
And says he:
—Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.
—He had no father, says Martin. That'll do now. Drive ahead.
—Whose God? says the citizen.
—Well, his uncle was a jew, says he. Your God was a jew. Christ was a jew like me.
Gob, the citizen made a plunge back into the shop.
—By Jesus, says he, I'll brain that bloody jewman for using the holy name.
By Jesus, I'll crucify him so I will. Give us that biscuitbox here.
—Stop! Stop! says Joe.
A large and appreciative gathering of friends and acquaintances from the metropolis and greater Dublin assembled in their thousands to bid farewell to Nagyaságos uram Lipóti Virag [Bloom]
[...]
Gob, the devil wouldn't stop him till he got hold of the bloody tin anyhow and out with him and little Alf hanging on to his elbow and he shouting like a stuck pig, as good as any bloody play in the Queen's royal theatre:
—Where is he till I murder him?
And Ned and J. J. paralysed with the laughing.
—Bloody wars, says I, I'll be in for the last gospel.
But as luck would have it the jarvey got the nag's head round the other way and off with him.
—Hold on, citizen, says Joe. Stop!
Begob he drew his hand and made a swipe and let fly. Mercy of God the sun was in his eyes or he'd have left him for dead. Gob, he near sent it into the county Longford. The bloody nag took fright and the old mongrel after the car like bloody hell and all the populace shouting and laughing and the old tinbox clattering along the street.
The catastrophe was terrific and instantaneous in its effect. The observatory of Dunsink registered in all eleven shocks, all of the fifth grade of Mercalli's scale, and there is no record extant of a similar seismic disturbance in our island since the earthquake of 1534, the year of the rebellion of Silken Thomas.

[araucaria]

What I am trying to say above is that story-telling becomes history-telling. Joyce’s Bloom/Ulysses/wandering Jew is a kind of Everyman since story-telling ‘began’ with Homer, whose Odysseus tells the Cyclops his name is Nobody (Outis). There is a pre-Joyce that includes Homer, and Rabelais as we saw, and an after-Joyce, including, but by no means limited to, quite a few authors I have referenced. The only novel Joyce managed to ‘kill’ was his own contribution to that larger picture. But he did not kill it in any destructive way: he took it to its end point, a form of ultimate completion. He only wrote one novel after Ulysses: Finnegans Wake, started in 1923, serialized under the title ‘Work in Progress’ until finally completed and published in 1939, shortly before his death. In this book, everyday characters truly rise to mythical status: the publican ‘Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker’, HCE for short, turns into Here Comes Everybody. His wife, ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’, becomes a river, every river. And so on. Finnegans Wake takes us all the way back to the Fall of Adam (appropriately in Dublin’s Phoenix Park), and then to the sleeping giant (Finnegan) awakening – complete with a rinse-and-repeat function: the end of the novel’s final unfinished sentence is given by the very first, which begins in mid-sentence with the word ‘riverrun’ – cyclical time applied to the very symbol of linearity, the river of time (and the Liffey of life) elsewhere we read ‘Anna was, Livia is, Plurabelle’s to be’ . Not only is the book very long, it is an endless loop.

The limits to this world view come precisely at the point where it becomes limitless. We saw in the episode with the citizen a kind of messianism with Bloom becoming a Jesus figure. (And we saw earlier how Hemingway was seen to resemble Michelangelo’s depiction of God :)) We also have James Joyce saying this: ‘The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.’ Joyce saw this for himself in terms of immortality: ‘I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.’ (Gebler Davies, p.290).

The godlike author is precisely what makes Joyce a writer for his time, early 20th century, for this became the mid-20th century issue with the traditional 19th century-style novel and its all-knowing author: his characters are like his creatures, he knows everything there is to know about them. A key element of literary theory therefore is the “death of the author” (Roland Barthes) whereby a piece of writing is to be interpreted independently of any author figure. See my post here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?81805-The-Blog-of-The-Ruiner-Inside-the-Illuminati-Mind&p=956730&viewfull=1#post956730). In this regard, Joyce actually took a backward step as an omniscient narrator reporting on the innermost thoughts of his characters on the toilet or in bed at night. He knows even more about his characters than Dickens about his. Any later novel of any real interest will involve a narrative where the narrator is not in full control, maybe a character describing things from their limited perspective. This is a very important issue right here and now, since it marks the more general difference in the 21st century between the status of the written word emanating from any authority such as church, state, mainstream science or mainstream media, and the exposure to non-authoritative sources such as bloggers, whistleblowers or alternative news sites. The problematizing of narration led to new genres such as mystery and detective novels in which the author is deliberately saying less than he knows – or saying one thing and meaning another. The relevance of this with respect to our need to improve our interpretative skills when sociopaths are around can be seen in this post (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=833954&viewfull=1#post833954) in which I look at a 1988 novel where there is a murderous paedophile on the loose. (This narrative is not entirely original, since Vladimir Nabokov (himself a likely victim rather than a perpetrator) showed in Lolita what a murderous paedophile might get away with through an in-your-face ‘fancy prose style’).

The fact is that Dickens was using the wrong tool to address our problems today. He tried to address the problems of his day, and subversive as he was, any small progress he may have made to solve them must have been in the unquantifiable manner of raising general awareness. To the extent that Dickens’ efforts were ineffectual, it may be that he was using the wrong tool for his own day: just like nowadays we learn not to believe everything we read in the newspapers, people then would mistrust what they read in a novel. The authority of the author was already under threat, and a good thing too. So I am extremely disturbed at the idea that someone like Miles Mathis should look back nostalgically to the age of Dickens and claim that the 20th century novel was dead in the water, move along nothing to see here. It is in total contradiction with my understanding of what a place like Avalon stands for. That was the conclusion I expressed before laying out the full argument, and again I apologize for jumping the gun. The reader now has more evidence than I had when I first reached that conclusion; all reactions are very welcome.

Immortality may be divine: but it is where process stops: canned fecal matter. ‘History’, says the character Stephen Dedalus, ‘is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.’ Joyce’s biggest enigma and puzzle and paradox is that the immortality he speaks of... refines him out of existence. Finnegans Wake is that nightmare world, full of portmanteau neologisms that most people find totally unreadable. In his megalomania he expects his readers to give him their undivided attention. But this message from a god can be met with its own inbuilt Luciferian response: non serviam; this is another god I will not serve. Meaning: I have read your all-inclusive story; in the words of Groucho Marx, include me out!

The wake is ambiguous: Finnegan’s wake is a watch over a dead person prior to burial; Finnegans wake, with that all-important missing apostrophe, is a collective resurrection or awakening. Joyce’s suicidal novel-killing novel was manure for a thriving future, an open system disguised as a closed system. ‘Read your own obituary notice; they say you live longer. Gives you second wind. New lease of life.’ (Ulysses) Here are three Joyce obituary notices: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2009/jan/14/1
http://www.nytimes.com/learning/general/onthisday/bday/0202.html
http://www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/major/Joyce_JA/Times_41.htm

This baker’s dozen of posts is now complete, a kind of closed system (‘see, it all fits’ says Joyce), but a fake one ;) – something doesn’t fit. That’s what the baker does: instead of stopping at 12, he carries on and you get an extra loaf. Hence we have an open system, a notion explored in other posts of mine (see below). So what doesn’t fit in? I don’t fit in.
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?91117-Elon-Musk-Nails-it-We-are-living-in-a-computer-simulation&p=1072702&viewfull=1#post1072702
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?90646-Do-ETs-exist&p=1068934&viewfull=1#post1068934
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=963607&viewfull=1#post963607
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?73364-Bill-Ryan-in-my-new-documentary---Alien-Reptilian-Legacy-release-March-2016-&p=944885&viewfull=1#post944885
http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?59041-LRH--L.-Ron-Hubbard-&p=678183&viewfull=1#post678183

We have come a full circle: there is no last word. Only this minute, I discovered a Miles Mathis thread (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?82417-The-Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-and-a-call-for-a-more-benevolent-leadership&p=963473&viewfull=1#post963473) to which I contributed last year.

Closure at the end of Winnegans Fake: fuitfiat (it was, let it be).

Yet is no body present here which was not there before. Only is order othered. Nought is nulled, fuitfiat! I quoted Picasso way back in my second post: ‘the value of a work [of art] resides precisely in what it is not.’ Sure, ‘nought is nulled’ – but something new is added (by nulling nought?). The creative injection of the novel. Ezra Pound: ‘make it new!’

[ThePythonicCow]

Either I was very lucky or someone fed me the information’. Well, precisely. And he thought he was doing science... This last is more commonly known as channelling, and on this website at least, the practice very properly does not meet with the Avalon administration’s approval. Maybe some of his science does fly; some of it probably does. That is not my point. My point is that it is self-avowedly only a little more methodical than the self-avowed baseline serendipity being exposed in this thread. Let me just state at this point with regard to myself that there is no one feeding information to me: this has been hard graft all the way. Maybe I’m just not very lucky, but I do try to be methodical. :)
I'd agree that in his physics work, Mathis is not following any variation of what I'd call a scientific method. However, I'd not call his method "channeling" either. I take channeling to be passing along, more or less verbatim, the communications of a spirit being. Mathis, as you describe, is chasing a "red string" of connections that tickle his fancy.

The physics of Mathis, in my view, provides an interesting model for the nature of the ether and how it forms the matter and forces that conventional material physics studies. His model has a variety of interesting connections with known experimental data, but it is a limited and simple model.

As with his studies of history, events, people and art, his strengths are in his eye for the visual, his memory for details, and his persistence in connecting the dots that seem, to his eye, to be related. His strengths are imbalanced - strong in specific ways, quite weak in other ways. One should not take things that Mathis concludes as likely true just because Mathis does, nor does Mathis provide a solid case to back his conclusions. Rather he will notice many things that might otherwise go unnoticed, and one might choose to pick amongst what he's observed for insights or evidence that are useful to one's own work, within one's own framework.

==

P.S. -- See this recent post by Omniverse for a more detailed discussion of how "channeled" material is generated: Technological Channeling Psy Ops -- Post #8 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?92791-War-vs-the-Truth-Psychological-Operations-Film&p=1120516&viewfull=1#post1120516).

[araucaria]

Yesterday I had a David Wilcock moment on making the last post of my essay. Wilcock likes to note ‘synchronicities’ when a few numbers are repeated in his viewer stats, which can happen pretty easily if you are not fussy about the actual numbers. Yesterday on the other hand, I got 6 significant figures: 19 posts, 2222 views. Taking these as a date, 1922/2/2 was the precise day of publication of Ulysses, expressly timed to coincide with Joyce’s 40th birthday. No big deal, just a nice coincidence.

34699

I apologize if I provided rather more material than anyone could yet take on board. The main thing is that it is out there, if and when required. You don’t need to read it all to get my self-evident point that more information about an individual will show that person in a possibly different, and likely more favourable light. It is not often you get a case like the Clintons, where seemingly everything comes as confirmation of what we already thought. Having got these posts out of the way, I can start addressing some of the extremely interesting points that other posters have already raised.

First Paul, thank you for all your helpful comments. Just one thought for the moment: when you say Mathis thinks outside the box (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94924-Some-anomalies-in-the-Miles-Mathis-material-an-alternative-picture&p=1119790&viewfull=1#post1119790), I am wondering whether that is enough any more: the box meme has become so much part of the picture, what we appear to have now are multiple boxes; certainly, he seems to have jumped into a box of his own making. Whether or not it is a nested box is neither here nor there: it is still a box, into which he is cramming material at least some of which does not belong. I personally am less interested in out-of-the-box thinking than in totally boxless thinking. Otherwise you are still in the hammer-and-nail configuration: everything goes in your box = everything is a nail for your hammer. It boils down to an issue of overgeneralization that I want to look into some more.

Now Runningdeer (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94924-Some-anomalies-in-the-Miles-Mathis-material-an-alternative-picture&p=1119715&viewfull=1#post1119715): I wholeheartedly agree with your basic point, Paula: my (rough) analogy would be a huge poker game, where the bidding is fast and furious and obviously a lot of people are bluffing, some massively so. At this stage, all hands are equal with the bluffers intent on undermining the confidence of those with a better hand. That is the only way they can win because if their bluff is called they have nowhere to hide. Conversely, the better your own hand, the more confidence you can have that you can prevail. You can work out the statistical probability, approaching certainty if you actually hold the best cards, although that rarely happens. But since the best hand doesn’t always win, the game is rigged in favour of a small amount of overconfidence. But we are not talking about a game with random cards; we are talking about real people (or mostly real people: there are a few jokers in the pack), and the overconfidence stimulated by the will to win is actually ruining people’s lives.

As you remind us in such timely fashion, the feminine gut brain tells us that we should be steering clear of this game altogether, which is obviously true; but it is a little late for that. The masculine head brain tells us that we should be enjoying it, which is manifestly false. If we combine the two, which we surely need to do, we may see that the way forward is to get the game over and done with once and for all, which means sitting it out till the end with all our chips on the table, to face final disclosure. Since it is only fun for the ‘winners’, killing the game means resoundingly reversing the usual outcome by being smart and working to have an unbeatable, unimpeachable hand when the bluffing stops.

The thing is that by simply walking away we would be abandoning a vital part of ourselves. I see it rather like a messy divorce. The husband has already removed both himself and the money, and is wanting everything else as well, including their child. This is the crunch point when the wife and mother cannot just walk away. This is the stuff of tragedy, as exemplified both historically in Puccini’s opera Madama Butterfly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madama_Butterfly) and massively in our own time when child abduction and the horrors of what this entails has gotten totally out of hand. Why? Because it has not been adequately dealt with: women alone have not been getting heard. It took the judgement of Solomon to save a baby, not in his wisdom but in the wisdom of its mother; all he had to do was voice the difference between a real and a fake mother. Things appear vastly more complicated nowadays, because the problem has been allowed to fester for so long. What I mean by being smart is this masculine/feminine combination which is, I think, what David Icke has in mind in this Pizzagate video, in which he calls for the utmost caution in getting the facts exactly right, with no overspill into fake information that would immediately be pounced upon.

KP4z4hF7cTY

[Foxie Loxie]

Finally finished reading all your posts, araucaria.....WHEW! :Party: Of course I learned much I did not know about before because of my narrowminded upbringing; but I certainly enjoyed your concluding that both the male & the female minds are needed. I don't even know how to play Poker, but I DO enjoy listening to the exchange of ideas! I also, from experience, understand that some people's personalities seem to require that there be some sort of "challenge" in order to make their lives worth living; or at least more interesting. :happy dog: (Just the musings of a Grandmother!)

[araucaria]

This synchronicity-no big deal thing (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94924-Some-anomalies-in-the-Miles-Mathis-material-an-alternative-picture&p=1120669&viewfull=1#post1120669) is paradoxically important. Synchronicity I find has as a wry sense of humour. Yesterday I was out in the car and the thought came back of the above post. Immediately I passed two cars with the number 832. What could this number mean? Joyce uses 432, being the year St Patrick (‘St Peatrick’ is his colourful nickname) brought Christianity to Ireland, and 32 represents the fall aspect of his rise-and-fall cycle, being the acceleration of gravity in feet per second per second. And 11 (a new start after 10) symbolizes the rise (hence the figure 1132). But what could 832 mean? Puzzled, I added the two occurrences: 832*2 = 1664. Now 1664, just two years before the great fire of London, was the year Kronenbourg first brewed what is now one of the most ordinary, readily-available beers in France. I know this because the brew is called... 1664. So that makes 832 a half of 1664: very small beer indeed. :)
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I am reminded of Jung’s publication of the I Ching in English, for which he... consulted the I Ching. The answer he got was that it was a good idea, but not to expect too much any time soon. Here synchronicity is using synchronicity to confirm it is no big deal. Interpreting this in the light of this thread, I observe that we are very good at finding patterns, which is very important. It is what enabled science to take over from ‘the gods’ or ‘chance’. Things we formerly ascribed to the god of this or that we now understand. But we still have a god called Murphy and his famous law of cussedness... ;) But we are now so good at seeing patterns everywhere that we need to learn to focus on the exceptions to the rule. Music for example is all about patterns: rhythm, harmony, repetitive tunes, all these things are patterns; but the interesting moments are always when those patterns are broken, by a syncopation, an unexpected disharmony, or a variation. Otherwise it becomes predictable and boring. ‘Make it new’, says Ezra Pound: Miles Mathis was new once, maybe a few times...

[araucaria]

Lazy Helene West wants to cut corners
Hi there Helene, good to talk with you. You are doing your own research and floating a bunch of interesting ideas; there is nothing lazy about that. I don’t think anyone would accuse Miles Mathis of laziness either, nor for that matter a reader of this thread. David Icke says he takes 10 hours to explain things that cannot be understood in 10 minutes: this is more of the same.

However, the notion of short cuts is an important one. We desperately need shortcuts: indeed the key issue of our time is precisely to determine what humanity as a whole is, needs and wants without getting bogged down in the needs and wants of individuals and small groups. But, as I was saying in my last post but one, we have to be careful – how to generalize without overgeneralizing, that is the question.

Your 3 bullet points starting ‘many...’ are an example of this. ‘Many’, which starts out as a string of individually examined cases, is a shortcut or generalization halfway to ‘most’ and possibly ‘all’, which is usually going to be an overgeneralization. However, in this particular case, we have the opposite. It is Mathis who is saying ALL of the people I look at are fake deaths and/or intelligence assets, and you who are basically diluting that figure into something more statistically likely by including others who do not fit the pattern. The paradoxical fact that your comments suggest is that Miles Mathis would be more credible if he told us about some of the times he got it wrong.

We can say ‘all humans need clean water’, a generalization that leads to a general solution, namely the provision of a mains supply of clean water. You don’t need to worry about the contents of Mrs Jones’s teapot when you do it on this large scale, but you do have to err on the safe side to make it work for everyone all or nearly the time. Mrs Jones herself generalizes when she adds a spoonful of tea per person plus ‘one for the pot’. The result is that the tea will be too strong for some and for others the mains water will be too full of purifying chemicals.

There are very few things you can say about ‘all humans’, yet as I said, the key issue facing us is precisely to determine what we can and must say about humanity as a whole. Hence a radical generalization is needed that misses out nothing important and yet does not overgeneralize. One of the other very few things you can say about ‘all humans’ then is paradoxically that they all call for individual treatment, i.e. not as a statistic. Doctors know perfectly well the chances of survival of a given patient, but they leave the statistics literally at the door. Patients going out the front door give the recovery rate, those leaving out the back door represent the death rate. But before and until they leave, every one of them is a special case, a Schrodinger’s cat, for whom everything and more will be done to defy the odds – ‘everything’ being state-of-the-art care, ‘and more’ being the ongoing research whereby we prefer to bend, i.e. improve, the statistics rather than lose a single patient who can be saved.

The same happens in the justice system: conviction rate is a police statistic; it can be high either because of good policing or because of inadequate defence lawyers; if your conviction rate drops, this would be a good thing if it is because every individual is getting a fair trial. So statistics are a generalization based on case-by-case treatment: a useful generalization if used correctly. Another way they can be misused is at another embedded level of generalization when numbers are so large that sampling is required. Election polls are one area highlighting – spectacularly so this year – the problem of defining a representative sample. Another is war casualties, unfortunately far too numerous to allow the exhaustive and exhausting individual count they really require. The best you can do is count the number of train passengers arriving at Auschwitz and subtract the number of survivors at the liberation, or compare a prewar and a postwar census to assess the overall damage to a given population. This is a ballpark figure to be revised downward as specific exceptions are found, or upward as minimum figures are revised. Hence it is possibly, but not necessarily, an overgeneralization for both serious revisionist historians to adjust, and and others to adjust to suit an ideological agenda; see here (https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10008193):

Dud data is an integral part of proper research. Take a medical trial (I have read a few research papers). Typically they will try several drugs against a control group on placebo. The results will be, Drug X was pretty good half or most of the time, Drug Y was not so good, and Drug Z was little better than placebo – which is not to say that placebo had no effect at all. So there is no black and white, just shades of gray: no miracle cure that works all the time, and even crushed chalk can occasionally do some good.

This is what I found with the material given in ‘The Stolen Century’ where Mathis found nothing but spies – not only that, but for him all spies are CIA Nazis. I did not find white instead of black, namely that none of these people had anything to do with intelligence activities: I found a range of grays. I found that John Quinn was very likely involved in intelligence as described, on a part-time basis, but for laudable reasons; that, again for laudable reasons, Hemingway was also, on a part-time basis, i.e. at least during the war, and on fishing trips off Cuba at moments when he wasn’t reeling in a fish or otherwise having a good time. I found that Ezra Pound was very likely talking politics in very concrete terms with John Quinn, but not at all with a view to furthering fascism. And lastly, I found that James Joyce was close to the perfect dud, having turned his back on Ireland and the Irish leaders he knew personally more than ten years previously. The only absolute value I turned up, even allowing for anachronism, was zero Nazi spy, nothing but anti-Nazis in fact – not a single bona fide fascist. That is a disturbing figure, because normally speaking that should not happen. True, it was a very small sample.

At best, this suggests an experimental artefact. When I see everything is dark, before wondering what is happening to the world, I begin by removing my shades :) Likewise, serious climate scientists faced with hockey sticks galore begin by discarding the hockey-stick algorithm. Hence Miles Mathis strikes me as either wearing conspiracy spectacles or running a conspiracy algorithm – not, I hasten to add, as a conspirator, but as a conspiracy theorist; but you see how the two camps can be joined at the hip. This is precisely the sort of thing that has David Icke worried were that mindset to be applied to Pizzagate.

Having said that, I am not going myself to fall into the very trap of overgeneralizing that I am describing. This is why I ended with a reference to Mathis’s work on The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, as a counter-example (I had completely forgotten about that material, or that it was the same guy behind it). In that piece, he applies my concept of fiction to a piece of writing in an unprejudiced approach that enables him to come away knowing more than he brought with him. To begin with, he has no author, but he knows somebody wrote it; the authorship problem is a side issue. Compare this with the Clinton emails, all of which have identified authors: authorship, albeit for different reasons, is a side issue; the only (superficial) battleground is provenance (Russia/NSA/FBI/CIA/China, or the DNC?), while the only real issue is what they actually say. In other words, as a document, the Protocols are totally real; they can only be a fake if ascribed to someone who did not write them, or a total fiction in the ordinary sense if totally unconnected to our reality. Mathis then applies textual analysis to paint a portrait of the type of person who could have authored the piece, which is the best he or anyone can do with the document alone. But to achieve this much, I am afraid he has used Modernist tools such as the ‘death of the author’ meme, although Modernism is anathema to him.

The bottom line then is that, on the basis of these two essays at least, Miles Mathis’s ‘main premise’ is not clear, at least to himself. On the one hand, his Modernism=fake theory leads him to a bunch of antifascist Nazis or anti-Nazi fascists. On the other, his implicit acceptance of Modernism in that other essay leads him to a stance that I wholeheartedly approve (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?82417-The-Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-and-a-call-for-a-more-benevolent-leadership&p=963631&viewfull=1#post963631)of. This is the Miles Mathis I can agree with on pragmatic grounds. As I said, the generalizing of the fakery meme inevitably grinds to a halt as soon as one hits something really real, such as self. When you hit that point, you either begin to doubt yourself, or you dismiss the whole thing as being itself unreal, fake or a gross overgeneralization. This other work, in contrast, has pragmatic validity in providing a basis for concrete action such as I describe here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?82417-The-Protocols-of-the-Elders-of-Zion-and-a-call-for-a-more-benevolent-leadership&p=966543&viewfull=1#post966543).

Overall, I think his heart is in the right place, but he is trying too hard. He doesn’t need to be a CIA asset himself to be playing into their hands. If you follow Paul’s link above to the Omniverse material you will find, among others things, this (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?92791-War-vs-the-Truth-Psychological-Operations-Film&p=1120529&viewfull=1#post1120529):

“It relies on the average person’s tendency to generalize
a single sample point to a whole group and use binary thinking.”
~Ex-CIA Engineer Dr. Robert Duncan; From the Out of Print Book: The Matrix Deciphered Overgeneralization – a category which includes all the –isms (sexism, racism, antisemitism...), phobias (xenophobia, homophobia...) and the mis- words (misogyny, misanthropy) – is an ‘average person’s tendency’. We need to do much better than average.

In the above-mentioned medical studies and other research, an effect becomes statistically significant with a probability of 0.05, i.e. odds of 20/1. Interestingly, if you take Wilcock’s synchronicities, a string of 3 identical digits is a 100/1 chance, so 3 identical digits in a five-digit string would be about 33/1. Hence Wilcock is seeing something statistically significant provided he only looks once; he only needs to look twice to fall under the threshold. But statistically significant is still small beer most of the time: unlikely things happen all the time (improbability is highly probable!); they only become important when say you are looking for a molecule to improve people’s health. I only had to think that synchronicity is the background placebo effect to read in the local paper a piece about a band called Placebo playing with a band called Phoenix, along with a cartoon. There is no end to this stuff.
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And most of all, there is no beginning. What happened before the Big Bang (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?29268-Nassim-Haramein&p=303584&viewfull=1#post303584)?
From post #10 (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94924-Some-anomalies-in-the-Miles-Mathis-material-an-alternative-picture&p=1119777&viewfull=1#post1119777):

I tend to feel if you're going to start a new thread start it fresh so someone reading for the first time gets the gist without having to sink time into backtracking.I fully understand and sympathize, Helene, but the problem is nothing new. 2,000 years ago, the Latin poet Horace pointed out how Homer started ‘in medias res’: ‘he always hurries to the main event and whisks his audience into the middle of things as though they knew already’, without going all the way back to the egg from which Helen of Troy was born. Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ab_ovo)mentions Laurence Sterne’s sendup of this idea, when Tristram Shandy records the night of his own conception as being the time his father forgot to wind up the clock, which really puts a spanner in the works from the getgo – a kind of time sink, to quote your words.

The fact is that an egg is no better a place to start, as there always has to have been a chicken first. We ourselves start life in medias res: the memorable form of consciousness kicks in after a few years and we need our parents to tell us what we were like before that. The idea of original sin is that we all have ‘previous’. We enter this world as you join an ongoing conversation; we go to school to get up to speed so as to be able to join in meaningfully – if that is still possible. The thing is, so many have been jumping in for so long that the conversation has gone round in circles to the point of becoming largely meaningless.

Heraclitus said you can never jump in the same river twice: without contradicting him, James Joyce is saying you jump every time into the same loopy river in a cycle of ‘forget remember’. And the kabbalists say that the Bible actually starts with ‘In the beginning – well, not quite the beginning...’. See this post (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?23126-God-gets-tired-after-spending-enegy&p=248484&viewfull=1#post248484).

[araucaria]

Finally finished reading all your posts, araucaria.....WHEW! :Party: Of course I learned much I did not know about before because of my narrowminded upbringing; but I certainly enjoyed your concluding that both the male & the female minds are needed. I don't even know how to play Poker, but I DO enjoy listening to the exchange of ideas! I also, from experience, understand that some people's personalities seem to require that there be some sort of "challenge" in order to make their lives worth living; or at least more interesting. :happy dog: (Just the musings of a Grandmother!)
Foxie Loxie, please don’t belittle yourself: a grandmother is a mainstay of any human family and hence society at large, potentially impervious to a narrow-minded upbringing. This much is obvious since you are still game for this ride, and yes, it is all about reconciling the male and female minds. This next few posts are mostly about the male side of the equation; we’ll come eventually to the feminine side, and later to the balancing. There is a generational aspect to this: from squabbling children to young men and women searching for a way to prosper together (and often coming a cropper), under the stabilizing influence of grandparents who have usually come to some peaceful working relationship. I am trying to make this thread as convivial as I can, not easy I know; I hope you enjoyed the glass of beer the other day. Today I am offering coffee and croissants, with a few grannies as well to keep you company :)

One of the stumbling-blocks, I find, is having a destination or goal such as proving a point or fulfilling some agenda. Another way to look at things is as going on an exploratory stroll, which may take you off the beaten track, maybe getting lost when the end point momentarily disappears from view. So often in life, we only see what we expect to see, i.e. what we have seen many times before. We wouldn’t recognize novelty even if it slaps us in the face. Intellectually, if you (think you) know in advance what you are looking for, then you are going to find it, even if it isn’t there, and you are not going to find the interesting stuff that really is there. The same mechanical, instinctive approach is at work. This ties in with what I was saying about shortcuts: sometimes we need them, but to make them work, sometimes we need to take the long route. Marcel Proust’s huge novel In Search of Lost Time aka Remembrance of Things Past does exactly that. He has two Sunday walks, the short Swann’s Way for rainy days, and the longer Guermantes Way for fine weather. It is only at the very end that he learns that Swann’s Way is a shortcut to the Guermantes estate. This is an on-the-ground example of the epiphany, the blissful moment when laborious remembrance is short-circuited and he actually relives a blissful childhood moment with his mother, simply by dipping a madeleine cake in his tea – liquid and solid forming an intermediate pap. You don’t get the bliss of the shortcut until you have experienced the full distance. We here are taking the long walk, without worrying about getting anywhere, because the weather is fine and the walk is meant to be enjoyable in itself. We have all the time in the world.

Miles Mathis rushes us to his destination: Intelligence. Very briefly on the way, he casts suspicion on the diminutive William James for his membership of the theosophical society. ‘I also encourage you to notice that Wikipedia downplays James' founding of the Society for Psychical Research as well as his membership in the Theosophical Society. We get one short sentence on each.’ He complains of brevity, and for his own ‘brief’ (statement of his case) he keeps returning to Wikipedia, which is never more than the tip of the given iceberg. What I have done so far has been to expand a couple of his paragraphs into 25,000 words. James himself in Pragmatism presciently describes how verifiability is a handy shortcut for verification; but for this to work, occasional verification is necessary:

Truth lives, in fact, for the most part on a credit system. Our thoughts and beliefs ‘pass,’ so long as nothing challenges them, just as bank-notes pass so long as nobody refuses them. But this all points to direct face-to-face verifications somewhere, without which the fabric of truth collapses like a financial system with no cash basis whatever. You accept my verification of one thing, I yours of another. We trade on each other’s truth. But beliefs verified concretely by SOMEBODY are the posts of the whole superstructure. So, what might be a legitimate justification for James joining the theosophical society? Well, always supposing a legitimate justification is needed without descending into censorship, we might see it in terms of research value. An interest in all kinds of unsavoury things can be justified in this way. One can make no judgement, for example, about the personal morals of a doctor on the basis that he treats venereal disease. It so happens that James delivered a series of lectures (the Gifford Lectures) in Edinburgh on The Varieties of Religious Experience (later turned into a book). This is a broad-ranging study that likewise says nothing about the author’s personal religious views. Not only does it not necessarily imply approval of anything, it has some critical things to say about certain forms of saintliness: ‘excessive devoutness as fanaticism’, notably when it affects a ‘feeble intellect’ and becomes a ‘theopathic condition’ (‘theopathic absorption’; p.293 of my edition).

James does quote Helena Blavatsky, on page 559, to illustrate his contention that ‘many mystical scriptures are indeed little more than musical compositions’, when they do not ‘awaken laughter’. James’s conclusion is that ‘mystical states carry authority for him who has them’ but that ‘no authority emanates from them which should make it a duty for those who stand outside of them to accept their revelations uncritically.’ He goes on to say that ‘as a rule, mystical states merely add a supersensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness. They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition (...) It is the rationalistic critic rather who plays the part of denier in the controversy, and his denials have no strength, for there never can be a state of facts to which new meaning may not truthfully be added, provided the mind ascend to a more enveloping point of view.’ (pp.560, 564) That is a pretty neutral thing to conclude about mystics and their critics, and it also shows James’s – doubtless imperfect – understanding of who Helena Blavatsky was and what she stood for in a totally innocent light. This is no more surprising that if we were told that he joined the Freemasons and knew nothing about what goes on beyond the 32nd degree. Hence ‘Freemasonry’ and other secret societies are labels that are far too general, unless you are slinging mud and are happy to see it stick on a lot of harmless bystanders as well.

The problem with this attack on James is that it can be turned back on its author. For, by the same token, does not Mathis disqualify himself by taking a look, not just at the CIA but also at The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion? I wonder, does that interest make him an antifascist Nazi or an anti-Nazi fascist? Having just discovered where I put my biography of Wyndham Lewis (Paul O’Keeffe, Some Sort of Genius: a Life of Wyndham Lewis, London, Jonathan Cape, 2000), I am going to talk about him, as another owner of the Protocols, instead of Mathis, of whom I know nothing. Wyndham Lewis, you will recall, is the artist-writer guy that fought in the first war and in Ezra Pound’s poem has a close brush with death while relieving himself. The version presented here is slightly different: Lewis was not relieving himself but relieving someone else on duty behind the line, while a couple of men got hit standing where he normally would have been posted. So while a bit of poetic licence has crept in, the basic story is very true, and so very banal, even though the biography as a whole undeniably portrays a man perhaps a little too full of himself and (to pursue the textile analogy) capable of embroidering a story to his personal advantage.

Here is Miles Mathis’s only reference to Wyndham Lewis.

We have even more evidence that all these people were Intelligence assets in the Letters of Marshall McLuhan. I was alerted to this by a reader. In a February 1952 letter to Ezra Pound, McLuhan says this:

Last year has been spent in going through rituals of secret societies with fine comb. As I said before I'm in a bloody rage at the discovery that the arts and sciences are in the pockets of these societies. It doesn't make me any happier to know that Joyce, Lewis, Eliot, yourself have used these rituals as a basis for art activity... You may say by secret societies he meant Thelema or Golden Dawn or something. But he is obviously aware that the secret societies themselves are in the pockets of Intelligence, since he adds,

Now that I know the nature of the sectarian strife among the Societies I have no intention of participating in it any further, until I know a good deal more. To hell with East and West. Note that “east and west.” Who was mainly concerned with the battle of east and west in 1952? The CIA, of course. The editor of these Letters reminds us that Wyndham Lewis also complained of the same thing in the same period, mainly in his Time and Western Man. Notice how Mathis’s claim that ‘he is obviously aware that the secret societies themselves are in the pockets of Intelligence’ is contradicted by the very quote he uses to back up that statement, which carries the proviso ‘until I know a good deal more’. What you have is a gap in McLuhan’s knowledge being filled by something Mathis thinks he knows. This is an egregious example of twisting someone’s words to make them mean what you want them to mean. I very much doubt if back in 1952 McLuhan was thinking of the CIA (founded in 1947) with reference to the likes of Joyce (died early 1941)... Now reread this: ‘Note that “east and west.” Who was mainly concerned with the battle of east and west in 1952?’ My answer: any concerned citizen despairing over the political pages of their daily newspaper and forming opinions to take to ballot box on election day or to some other political activity before that. What we get time and again from Mathis are anachronisms due to absence of context. Context includes everyday things people were doing back then, and also interactions between the given individuals, about which we can find out much more. As soon as you start fleshing it out, the picture looks absurd.

On the subject of newspapers and everyday things, a page from Time Regained (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300691.txt), the final novel in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time shows how during World War I even the pseudo-nobility reacted to news, albeit with zero empathy. This passage takes the experience of unreality (one aspect of ‘fakery’) to extreme lengths, since the unreality of war is placed a degree further away even than the unreality of play-acting, itself a world apart from the here-and-now of one’s creature comforts:

One might say the Verdurins did, nevertheless, think about it,
since they had a political salon where the situation of the armies and
of the fleets was discussed every day. As a matter of fact, they
thought about those hecatombs of annihilated regiments, of engulfed
seafarers, but an inverse operation multiplies to such a degree what
concerns our welfare and divides by such a formidable figure what does
not concern it, that the death of millions of unknown people hardly
affects us more unpleasantly than a draught. Mme. Verdurin, who
suffered from headaches on account of being unable to get croissants
to dip into her coffee, had obtained an order from Cottard which
enabled her to have them made in the restaurant mentioned earlier. It
had been almost as difficult to procure this order from the
authorities as the nomination of a general. She started her first
croissant again on the morning the papers announced the wreck of
the Lusitania. Dipping it into her coffee, she arranged her
newspaper so that it would stay open without her having to deprive her
other hand of its function of dipping, and exclaimed with horror, "How
awful! It's more frightful than the most terrible tragedies." But
those drowning people must have seemed to her reduced a thousand-fold,
for, while she indulged in these saddening reflections, she was
filling her mouth and the expression on her face, induced, one
supposes, by the savour of the croissant, precious remedy for her
headache, was rather that of placid satisfaction.(Notice in passing how the function of dipping the croissant into her coffee parodies the madeleine effect; it is a parody because no distance is overcome in time or space, and there is no mother/son or other interpersonal empathy felt at all, just the opposite in fact: placid (self-)satisfaction instead of bliss.)
Life goes on. Transpose this to the early 1950s. In 1951, people were scared to death with the Cold War, and had their kids at school learning to ‘Duck and Cover’ with Bert the Turtle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_and_cover) in the event of a nuclear attack. I am sure ‘To hell with East and West’ was a sentiment shared by many of these toddlers in their own childish way, for how could they feel the slightest concern for, or at all get their little heads round the idea of Armageddon when this drill was just more evidence that the grown-ups had everything under control to protect them. They were among the first to be ‘concerned with the battle’ and the very last who should have been. In the service of intelligence they were not. They should have been out playing.

To give another example of how contemporary context is needed to understand things, note how Mathis makes a big deal about John Quinn’s 1913 Armory Show being held at a (disused) military facility. My first thought is that an exhibition on this scale (‘a show of giant proportions’ that ‘displayed some 1,300 paintings, sculptures, and decorative works’) could not be held at any old venue and indeed, this material consideration is borne out with the fact that later, in Chicago and Boston, ‘due to a lack of space, all the work by American artists was removed’ (See a Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armory_Show)with photos of two exhibition organizers, neither of whom is John Quinn). My second thought relates to security, which could only be a nightmare with so many artworks, albeit recent and not yet priceless, and so many visitors; a military facility might be better than any other to provide tight enough security. Why would tight security be such an issue at that particular time, a century before it became routine? Quite simply because throughout the Armory Show, from the planning stage through the actual exhibition period and beyond, the Mona Lisa was missing from the Louvre, whence it had been stolen in August 1911 and whither it was not returned until December 1913. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincenzo_Peruggia

If you need a different sort of corroboration for what I’m saying, the historian Michael Parenti uses the same argument to refute Noam Chomsky’s dismissal of CIA involvement in the JFK assassination, which is the sort of thing that makes Chomsky a shill in the eyes of many:

Chomsky argues that the CIA would have had no grounds for wanting to kill JFK, because he was a dedicated counterinsurgent cold warrior. Chomsky arrives at this conclusion by assuming that the CIA had the same reading of events in 1963 that he has today. But entrenched power elites are notorious for not seeing the world the way left analysts do. To accept Chomsky’s assumptions we would need a different body of data from that which he and others offer, data that focuses not on the Kennedy administration’s interventionist pronouncements and policies but on the more private sentiments that festered in intelligence circles and related places in 1963. (Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths, San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1996, p.178)Mathis is making the same two ‘mistakes’: hindsight, and from the wrong side of the fence: to accept his assumptions, we need data that focuses not on the policies ‘that festered in intelligence circles’ but on ‘the more private sentiments’ that characterize the mindset of the artist/writers he takes to task. Those sentiments are not so very private, being actually published, albeit in the form of art of one kind or another such as requires a degree of competence and understanding that appears to be lacking. These are important points I am making, probably applicable on occasion to many bona fide researchers as well as disinfo agents – hence something for their readers to keep in mind.

.../....

[Flash]

Started at the end, 19 post left to read, going backward.... Ouf!

Although more "verbuous", and eloquently written, you feel more and more like Carmody to me 😱😰😝. It would certainly help if I would have had earlier exposure to Joyce or Mathis or the whole anglo saxon literary writings.

So, like with Carmody, i need to reread some of these posts.

However, the tiny zest of understanding i reached reading you, Arsucaria, not only impressed me, but made me go further in developing a clearer comprehension of the nature of things, of thinkings, of mind errors as well as mind brillancy and just thinking.

Thanks for furthering my own thinking process and enhancing my own world views.

[araucaria]

Started at the end, 19 post left to read, going backward.... Ouf!

Thank you Flash, as always, for your kind words: they are much appreciated. I have no problem being compared to Carmody, because while his subject matter is very difficult, his presentation is no more difficult than he can help: there is a way through. So it is nonetheless a form of clarity, since the writer at least understands what he is talking about. That is not as common as you might think. Most of us, at least some of the time, stumble over our formulations, paper over the cracks instead of trying to mend them, and ultimately don’t really know what we are talking about.

However, I am not sure reading my posts in reverse order is going to help at all – for a start, my next posts are going to catch you on your blind side! There is a definite linear component to my exposition whereby certain statements follow on from each other in the given order, as you will have noticed in the post you read. Joyce’s prose is notoriously terribly difficult, notably because of the cyclical element This means that on the largest scale the end flows back into the beginning, but it is in no way a palindrome that reads the same both ways. His own expression is ‘tellibly divilcult’, which I take to mean (on the basis on internal clues) there is a ‘tellable’ component with a 'beginning', 'middle' and 'end', hindered by a ‘devil cult’ of satanic reversals. If you want to see how reversal leads to a very different story, read Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis. See here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=564868&viewfull=1#post564868)and here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?71346-Bad-Science-the-Big-Bang-Theory&p=833456&viewfull=1#post833456).

[araucaria]

.../....
My point here is that, as with William James above, creative artists and writers (intellectuals, not children) not only have a need to know for the practice of their art: they have a way to know through the practice of their art. Politics are an integral part of that. Politics are not like religious observance restricted for some to Sunday mornings: church and the Sunday papers. They inform everything one does, especially when this is art. And as a corollary, this is what makes, or should make, any individual life a work of art. And sometimes this gets into the mainstream press, like only yesterday, presenting James Joyce in a positive light, as someone forward-looking, wanting to embrace “the loveliness which has not yet come into the world” (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/28/europe-james-joyce-a-portrait-of-the-artist-as-a-young-man-ireland-brexit-easter-rising-1916).


I have a double problem with the status of Wyndham Lewis in Mathis’s essay: I have a problem with his absence from the list of suspects – the above mention is all we get, and he is presented as one of the plaintiffs; I also have a problem with his double presence in the above extract: Mathis appears not to have noticed that the Lewis referred to by McLuhan between Joyce and Eliot is not McLuhan’s Texan wife Corinne née Lewis but the selfsame Wyndham Lewis, presumably complaining about himself – talk about ‘sectarian strife’! This at least is another knot in the thread Mathis is trying to unravel that I want to explore because when we find someone on both sides of an argument we have a chance to move away from an area of conflict into an area of possible resolution.

Being on a parallel course to Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis should really be another prime suspect. He picked up an abiding reputation as a Nazi sympathizer after publishing a book in 1931 called Hitler that showed early sympathy to the Führer before he rose to power although apparently no understanding of antisemitism, and despite bringing out another book in 1939 totally disassociating himself from Nazi Germany, and a third against antisemitism. You are not allowed to change your mind, anything you say will be carved in stone; you are labelled once and for all. But if one takes something he actually wrote, the labels fade away behind the meaning of his words. Clearly he is not using the word Fascist in the expected manner; he is talking to ordinary people in their ordinary lives:

a word to the Fascist at large. You stand to-day where Socialism stood yesterday – for the Poor against the Rich. You as a Fascist stand for the small trader against the chain-store; for the peasant against the usurer; for the nation, great or small, against the super-state; for personal business against Big Business; for the craftsman against the middleman; for the creator against the middleman; for all that prospers by individual effort and creative toil, against all that prospers in the abstract air of High Finance or of the theoretic ballyhoo of Internationalism. (British Union Quarterly, 1937). (Some Sort of Genius, p.366) Ezra Pound makes the same point more succinctly in the Cantos: ‘“No where so well deposited as in the pants of the people, / Wealth ain’t, “ said President Jackson.’ Notice how Wikipedia (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Wyndham_Lewis)makes a couple of changes in the above quote: ‘Machine’ for ‘middleman’, and dropping the reference to Socialism altogether. This is critical, because Lewis is pointing the finger at the way the labels have been changed. Socialism (or communism) is a dirty word especially when aimed at ordinary people. The same ordinary people then get tarred with the other brush, the brush of fascism. Ordinary people are fascists; people at the top are liberals, or maybe capitalists, nothing nasty of course. The people are actually not one thing or the other; they are simply doing what they have always done, scraping a livelihood and being demonized one way or the other, when the real Fascist Communists are the elite in charge of both shaping the theories and meting out the punishment on the ground. Lewis is not talking to them or as one of them, but as one of the people. That is the simple fact that is further demonized as populism or demagoguery, while power is wielded on a permanent basis by a coalition of ‘compassionate’ conservatives and champagne ‘socialists’. Not all these people are scoundrels: some or many are perfectly decent, with the best of intentions; but their elitism is like the air they breathe, they simply don’t see it. If you take another 19th century novel, not Dickens but Anthony Trollope, you see how good and bad operate together in a vacuum from which the populace is excluded. See these posts here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=1050797&viewfull=1#post1050797)and here (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?30405-Here-and-Now...What-s-Happening&p=1050745&viewfull=1#post1050745).

Coming back to Mathis’s treatment of William James, the final chapter of O’Keeffe’s biography, ‘Post mortem’, describes something that happened at Lewis’s dilapidated and soon-to-be demolished flat, when one Patricia Hutchins came to recover some soggy documents that had been left behind. One of these, possibly ‘hidden away behind furniture’ according to his widow, was The Protocols of Zion, which she claimed never to have seen before and which she confiscated. Here is Paul O’Keeffe:

As the author of a book on anti-Semitism, Lewis had, of course, an impeccable excuse for possessing a copy of the infamous text. Indeed, in The Jews Are They Human? he specifically referred to it, as one extreme of his own even-handed approach to the subject:

I am proof against The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, and also against invitations to pro-Jewish excesses. I neither regard the person of Jewish race as a devil nor as a darling.Ironically, Lewis’s little volume of 1939, deploring the treatment of Jew by Gentile, has acquired, on the basis of its too-clever title alone [‘a parody of Gustaff Renier’s best-selling humorous study of national stereotypes: The English: Are They Human?’ p.390], as evil a reputation as The Protocols of Zion itself. So too the glib, under-researched defence of Hitler, published in 1931 at a time when not even the most prescient of political commentators could have imagined the full horror of the Third Reich, has, with hindsight, caused its author to be branded ‘Fascist’. Left Wings Over Europe and Count Your Dead: They Are Alive! are remembered, if they are remembered at all, not as anti-war books, but as pro-Mussolini and pro-Franco respectively. Finally even his 1939 anti-Nazi book, The Hitler Cult and How It Will End, written, it is argued, too late in the day to be at all convincing as a genuine change of heart, is seen as damage-limitation rather than recantation. ‘These are long vendettas,’ he had written in 1933, of present and future detractors, ‘a peculiar people, neither forgivers nor forgetters.’
Today, almost 70 years later (...) The stigma remains. His widow had good reason to be protective. (p.635-6)This story has an interesting parallel, for Lewis himself was alarmed to discover his Hitler book at some friends’ house a few years after its publication, not wanting his friend’s wife to get the wrong idea. So the friend hid the book behind some other books, later discovering that Lewis had made off with it (O’Keeffe, p.484). Sometimes a writer can disown a book he has written.
This labelling trap which Miles Mathis falls into with his notions of intelligence assets, modernist fakes and so on, really does tie us in knots. From Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s The Controversy of Zion: How Zionism Tried to Resolve the Jewish Question, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996, pp.198-9, where that word ‘many’ starts quite a cascade:

many of the Bolsheviks in Russia itself [were Jewish], too many for their own good. The October Revolution had given a new stimulus to antisemitism in the West, which was shaken by revolution, expropriation and terror. A high proportion of the Bolsheviks were Jews, most notably Leon Trotsky whose nom de guerre concealed his original name of Bronstein but scarcely disguised his origins. This did not escape notice; it kindled much hatred in return, and even saw a reprise of a classic antisemitic fantasy. ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ was a fabrication which purported to set forth a great world-wide Jewish conspiracy. It had circulated in Russia before the war and made its way west after. It was a comment on the climate of the time that the ‘Protocols’ were taken seriously by The Times in May 1920, and that the editor of another London paper, H. A. Gwynne of the Morning Post, wrote a respectful introduction to them. Even Winston Churchill – in whose extraordinary and chequered career philosemitism was generally a fixed point – could denounce ‘the international Jews’. Their ‘world-wide conspiracy’ was dedicated to the overthrow of civilisation’, he wrote in 1920, and warned of ‘the international Soviet of the Russian and the Polish Jew’, as well as of a ‘very powerful’ lobby of English Jews. This was a man who had and was to have many Jewish friends and associates, Weizmann among them. The aberration can only be understood in terms of the violent anti-Bolshevik mood in which Churchill was caught up. (...)After another war, times had changed, and so had Churchill. He was not one thing or the other, he was both at different times: a work in progress as Avalonians like to say. From The Second World War, Vol. I, The Gathering Storm, Cassell & Co., 1948, pp.43.-4, he explains how Hitlerism and antisemitism are totally synonymous... to the black-and-white thinking of the Führer himself:

The main thesis of Mein Kampf is simple. Man is a fighting animal, therefore the nation, being a community of fighters, is a fighting unit. Any living organism which ceases to fight for its existence is doomed to extinction. A country or race which ceases to fight is equally doomed. The fighting capacity of a race depends on its purity. The Jewish race, owing to its universality, is of necessity pacifist and internationalist. Pacifism is the deadliest sin; for it means the surrender of the race in the fight for existence. (...) The aristocratic principle is fundamentally sound. Intellectualism is undesirable (...) Nothing could have been effected by the bourgeois virtues of peace and order.One thing Lewis did not like about Joyce was his ‘bourgeois’ side: Joyce admits only to be an ordinary middle-class person. Anthony Burgess, who edited A Shorter Finnegans Wake and of course himself later mangled the English language in his A Clockwork Orange, once joked with Jorge-Luis Borges that they shared the same name, meaning burgher or... bourgeois. In ‘Joyce the bourgeois’ wryly refers to himself in mangled form: ‘poorjoist (http://peterchrisp.blogspot.fr/2014/01/wyndham-lewis.html)’. There is nothing wrong with being middle-class per se; it is the swing-vote class that can choose to side with the rest of the people or with the elite; among them, the intelligentsia are a special (influential) and potentially easy target inasmuch as they tend to see themselves as an intellectual elite. Ezra Pound puts it this way in the Cantos: ‘“Artists high rank, in fact sole social summits / which the tempest of politics can not reach,” / which remark appears to have been made by Napoleon.’ This would be a good reason for attacking this group – and for defending it too. See this post (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?78782-Charlie-Hebdo-shooting-eleven-dead-at-Paris-offices-of-satirical-magazine&p=921033&viewfull=1#post921033).

We know something of what happened to Lewis to change his mind: he made two trips to Germany, in 1934 and 1937. On the second occasion, he came to Berlin from Warsaw, where he had seen the Ghetto first hand – and recommended that anyone anxious to form an opinion about the Jewish problem should do likewise. He visited Berlin ‘en touriste’ having declined to fall in with an arrangement made by ‘an English admirer of Herr Hitler’ to meet the Führer (O’Keeffe, p.370). So apparently his mind was made up by that time. O’Keeffe speculates that the ‘English admirer’ was another Joyce, William Joyce, aka the infamous Lord Haw-Haw, who broadcast out of Germany during the war and was executed for his trouble (no doubt justifiably, I really don’t know; but the parallel with Pound in Italy is worth exploring, for similarities as well as the differences), and with whom Lewis once dined at British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley’s place. Instead of jumping to the conclusion that Lewis was a fascist, I would say that you can share a meal with someone without sharing their views (one man’s meat is another man’s poison as the saying goes), and speculate that Lewis stood up Herr Hitler precisely because he had heard enough first hand already. Some people are not ‘jung and freudened’ (Joycean for young and frightened), but mature and not so scared that they cannot take a look for themselves.

.../...

[araucaria]

The basic point I am making can be summed up by the formula, When is an X not an X? When is a Jew not a Jew? When is a Churchill not a Churchill? General answer to them all: when these labels are found to be too one-dimensional. When is a phallic symbol not a phallic symbol? According to Freud, ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ Which brings us back to Joyce, who says, ‘When is a man not a man?’ ‘When he’s a sham’ (a pun on the name Shem, one of his warring twins). Likewise, when is a river not a river? When it’s a cloud; i.e. when it becomes part of a loop formed by the cycle of water reaching the sea then making its way back to the mountain. In other words, labels like ‘man’ and ‘river’ are for convenience only. A river is also not a river when it is the land around it. Its visible source is only one of thousands of sources coming from all directions along its course. And it works both ways: land is simply a drier form of a geography with the river at the wetter end of the same spectrum. In wet weather, the land drains into the river; in dry weather, the river is drained into (irrigates) the land. That is the bigger picture of the thing we call ‘river’. It is an example of what Terence McKenna means in saying that Finnegans Wake is all about ‘dissolving boundaries’. I would add that the masculine counterpart to the feminine river is the city, which can extend its boundaries through urban sprawl but resists dissolution.
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I would further add that there is also the smaller picture. Take a single molecule of water in that river as a conscious entity. It might have joined the river from any one of those sources, or it might have arrived directly through rainfall. It might have raced down the mainstream all the way, or possibly spent eons visiting the stagnant backwaters, hitching a lift from a fish to get from one to the other. It might have been recycled ten times though a city water system, going through a shower, a dish-washer or their owner before being flushed down the sewers. Or it might have recently arrived from the other side of the world as part of a cup of coffee drunk by some Japanese just before hopping on a long-haul flight. What we call a river is the combination of all the myriad lives of its individual molecules and their interactions. Now imagine some of those interactions and how they might lead to planetary awareness. Say a lifelong stay-at-home molecule notices how lately no one has been holidaying in hot arid places like they used to (desertification); or hears stories from the seafarers of seeing more of the coastal land above the horizon than they ever did before (rising sea levels); or meets many more molecules reporting hair-raising experiences inside typhoons and tornadoes (climate change); or encounters total strangers that have never been anywhere for many millennia (sinking water table). And of course these travelling molecules will be bringing souvenirs with them such as disease or radioactivity, eventually causing widespread contagion. See this (http://www.neonnettle.com/features/448-officials-fukushima-has-now-contaminated-1-3-of-the-worlds-oceans)posted by Jeff Rense.

The same thing happens with language. Some Jews are Bolsheviks. Some Bolsheviks are evil murderers. To generalize is to spread contagion. We have to go in the opposite direction and restrict the application of these labels: this Jew is not a Bolshevik; that Jew is a Bolshevik but not an evil murderer. You could also go in the opposite direction by simply following Hitler’s logic, and say a Nazi/fighter is an antisemite/antipacifist, therefore a Jewish Nazi is a contradiction in terms. While such hybrids/hypocrites doubtless exist, they are not typical, still less stereotypical. Again, you could also go in the opposite direction by noting how within a few decades fascist Italy turned to a government in coalition with the Communists (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrico_Berlinguer). Or you may note how the postwar papacy has swung from the far right to the far left twice over.

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[araucaria]

.../...

I said earlier that Miles Mathis reads things into a piece of writing that are not there; he also puts thoughts into his reader’s mind. When he says ‘You may say by secret societies he [McLuhan] meant Thelema or Golden Dawn or something’, er no, I would not say any such thing; I would say ‘what the hell are these “rituals of secret societies” common to Pound, Joyce, Lewis and Eliot?’ The only rituals I know of in this connection are the Catholic rituals observed by McLuhan himself since he converted in 1937 after reading Chesterton, himself a convert, as if they are okay for not being secret. And they are perfectly okay: no one is accusing McLuhan of conspiring with Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who also converted to Catholicism, and Eliot, who converted to Anglo-Catholicism. They were each responding to some personal experience of a higher dimension. C.S. Lewis (no relation as far as I know) was another for whom religion became hugely important as he came under Tolkien’s influence. It seems no easier to point to any general phenomenon here than it would be in noting that C.S. Lewis died on the same day as Aldous Huxley, and... JFK.

There are several knots to be unpicked here. Christianity is only okay if you identify with the grassroots and not with the embedded secret society known as the Vatican, or doubtless that other embedded secret society, the Society of Jesus. And conversely, any known value in truly secret societies may possibly be found hidden in plain sight in the work of published authors: where else would we hope to find it? This is again the insider-turned-whistleblower under suspicion simply for possessing secret information: how did they get it? It is tempting to become wary of Catholic converts since Tony Blair joined their ranks, but I shall not go there.

A second sticking point is the notion of ritual: while I am unclear as to what is meant in relation to secret societies, which at least have such things, I fail to see how it would relate to dealings with the CIA – and I still have very little inkling as to the connection with the writers referred to. The commonality of secrecy is an obvious attractor, but is there a ritual component to this connection? This is a staple of the most lurid conspiracy theories, but I am not going there either. At the moment of writing I don’t actually know where I am going with this; the beauty of creative writing however is that formulating a question is a first step to finding the answer.

There is more to the 1952 McLuhan letter to Ezra Pound than I have stated so far. Was he writing to the conspiracy theorist at that time locked up in an asylum having only just saved his neck on treason charges, or was he writing to Mathis’s intelligence asset hidden away at some unknown location?

Pound himself was also not aloof from political reality. An admirer of Mussolini, he lived in fascist Italy beginning in 1925. When World War II broke out, Pound stayed in Italy, retaining his U.S. citizenship, and broadcasting a series of controversial radio commentaries. These commentaries often attacked Roosevelt and the Jewish bankers whom Pound held responsible for the war. By 1943 the U.S. government deemed the broadcasts to be treasonous; at war's end the poet was arrested by the U.S. Army and kept imprisoned in a small, outdoor wire cage at a compound near Pisa, Italy. For several weeks during that hot summer, Pound was confined to the cage. At night floodlights lit his prison. Eventually judged to be mentally incompetent to stand trial, Pound was incarcerated in St. Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C. He stayed in the hospital until 1958 when Robert Frost led a successful effort to free the poet. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/ezra-pound Was McLuhan trying to help Pound, as Robert Frost later did, and as Eustace Mullins did (by researching 'the Jewish bankers whom Pound held responsible for the war’, including the Warburgs since the previous war, as we saw earlier)? Or was he hitting a man while he was down? I don’t know; but I do know that he had a bone to pick with Wyndham Lewis, or rather Wyndham Lewis had a bone to pick with him after the war. McLuhan, was a Canadian who hopped in an out of the US to avoid the draft. He arranged for Lewis to lecture in St Louis, with the promise of some good money on the side doing portraits. The money never materialized, and Lewis eventually cottoned on to the fact that McLuhan had been using him to get himself back to Canada as part of his draft avoidance. But let me quote the whole episode from Paul O’Keeffe.

It was not, however the harmless mangling of a press release [...but] a section of the article in which the local reporter had got his facts more or less correct that embarrassed Lewis and caused him to cancel the [speaking] engagement. In the second paragraph, he was described as ‘editor of the Blast, a magazine publishing the works of many well-known writers, including Ezra Pound.’
Since his indictment for treason by a Federal Grand Jury in Washington DC on 26 July 1943, the author of The Cantos had become a potentially dangerous man to be associated with. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into the war against the Axis Powers, he had continued broadcasting on Rome Radio, thereby ‘adhering’ to his country’s enemies and ‘giving them Aid and Comfort’. There was a strong likelihood that, when the war was over and the time came for such scores to be settled, Ezra Pound would hang.
Lewis was horrified at a 40-year-old association with an indicted traitor being publicised in a small community naturally mistrustful of strangers and in wartime positively xenophobic. He and his wife had already been the target of gossip and insinuations [...] (pp. 499-500)O’Keeffe describes how Lewis wrote McLuhan a letter which, apart from saying ‘I am ashamed to say you inveigled me down to St. Louis. You came up here to avoid the draft. We changed places’, was full of ‘generalities and longterm grudges’ which however failed to explain exactly what the problem was on this occasion: that explanation (‘You have made it impossible for me to give my lecture’) did not make it past the draft stage. The only subsequent mention of McLuhan in Lewis’s biography is of him writing to report his ‘evangelising’ Lewis’s novel Self Condemned as ‘a very important piece of work’ (p.605; this would be in 1955). Hence, without wishing to read too much into this limited information, McLuhan seems not to have understood the damage he did in mentioning Pound, meaning it may have been unintentional. This in turn would mean that he did not share the view of Pound as an American equivalent of Lord Haw-Haw during the war.
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[araucaria]

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If we are to make anything of this McLuhan quote, we need to understand better where he is coming from. He was not a creative writer like the men he is criticizing, but an academic (those who can’t, teach...). In the video below, explaining his ‘medium is the message’ theory, at 2.20 he says that the telephone environment as a ‘structure of awareness affecting everyone’ is much more important than any given conversation: it doesn’t much matter what you actually say. This is the direct opposite of what I, as a writer, mean by the phrase with respect to a piece of writing. For me the particular unique occurrence, the private conversation between A and B, is absolutely crucial for those two persons and for no one else. Equating the medium and the message for me is about managing the physical parameters of the given medium to the given content; for a very simple example by realizing that some things are ambiguous when spoken, e.g. over the phone.
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In contrast, the ‘structure of awareness affecting everyone’ sounds more like the NSA records of everything that was ever said over the phone – begging the question: If it doesn’t much matter what you actually say, then why the heck does Intelligence need to know? I hadn’t thought of it this way before, never having read the guy; but if he applies the same thinking to literature, then straightaway one sees the problem: it doesn’t much matter what X, Y or Z actually writes, the medium is all that counts, and all they are doing is contributing to the overall ‘structure of awareness’. No wonder then that they become an object of interest to spies instead of to readers. But of course the key difference is secrecy, or the lack of it: publication means publicity. Okay, so you try to influence what authors write: that would be self-contradictory, because it amounts to admitting that what they write is important after all. But worse than that, their writing is important first and foremost to themselves, precisely because they are ahead on their own turf and can resist unwanted influence. To influence someone like Joyce, you would need the skills of someone like Joyce. The CIA’s well-tried method for controlling a loose cannon is to silence him, there is no alternative. Of course, the censorship takes place at the level of the publishers, who only let through what they want and are more easily controllable. Back then, printers were also responsible for what they printed, and so the only way to publish Ulysses was to send it to a French printer in Dijon who could not read a word of English.

McLuhan’s reading skills don’t sound too good either. He states (at 5 mins) that to read is etymologically to guess: ‘reading is actually an activity of rapid guessing’ (e.g. between multiple meanings of a word).He says good readers make good executives because they make all their decisions at high speed. So now we know why we live under a corporatocracy, sometimes aka fascism... speed-readers piling up the faulty guesswork.

‘Look it up in the big dictionary’ says McLuhan – okay, let’s do that. The Oxford English Dictionary, probably the very biggest, does attest, in its definitional section, that ancient usage from the year 1000, but also quotes Bede’s History from a century earlier in the sense ‘to have an idea; to think or suppose’. Going even further back, in the etymological section that precedes these definitions, you read the following:

The original senses of the Teut. verb are those of taking or giving counsel, taking care or charge of a thing, having or exercising control over something etc. (...) The sense of considering or explaining something obscure or mysterious is also common in the various languages... McLuhan is proving his point about ‘rapid guessing’ (and mine as well); and I am reading ‘reading’ in this more careful, responsible, advisory, considerate and helpful way. He has almost nothing to say about how a telephone conversation actually works. To learn a bit about that, one needs to take counsel from a great writer, Marcel Proust, in The Guermantes Way (http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300411.txt), whose explanations of some the arcanes are quoted below. McLuhan says (at 6 mins) that an artist sets a trap to catch your attention: ‘that is the nature of art’. Not true: the artist merely establishes a connection to his reader/viewer/listener through a medium; it is in the nature of that medium to present a few obstacles to perfect communication for the unpractised. Proust offers a few of these from the early days of telephony as being also germane to his own medium of writing: what he does to his reader is nothing to do with setting traps, more like putting in an old-fashioned trunk call. His reader may be out – with or without an answerphone – or may hang up on him.

One morning, Saint-Loup confessed to me that he had written to my
grandmother to give her news of me, with the suggestion that, since
there was telephonic connexion between Paris and Doncières, she might
make use of it to speak to me. In short, that very day she was to give
me a call, and he advised me to be at the post office at about a
quarter to four. The telephone was not yet at that date as commonly in
use as it is to-day. And yet habit requires so short a time to divest
of their mystery the sacred forces with which we are in contact, that,
not having had my call at once, the only thought in my mind was that
it was very slow, and badly managed, and I almost decided to lodge a
complaint. Like all of us nowadays I found not rapid enough for my
liking in its abrupt changes the admirable sorcery for which a few
moments are enough to bring before us, invisible but present, the
person to whom we have been wishing to speak, and who, while still
sitting at his table, in the town in which he lives (in my
grandmother's case, Paris), under another sky than ours, in weather
that is not necessarily the same, in the midst of circumstances and
worries of which we know nothing, but of which he is going to inform
us, finds himself suddenly transported hundreds of miles (he and all
the surroundings in which he remains immured) within reach of our ear,
at the precise moment which our fancy has ordained. And we are like
the person in the fairy-tale to whom a sorceress, on his uttering the
wish, makes appear with supernatural clearness his grandmother or his
betrothed in the act of turning over a book, of shedding tears, of
gathering flowers, quite close to the spectator and yet ever so
remote, in the place in which she actually is at the moment. We need
only, so that the miracle may be accomplished, apply our lips to the
magic orifice and invoke—occasionally for rather longer than seems to
us necessary, I admit—the Vigilant Virgins to whose voices we listen
every day without ever coming to know their faces, and who are our
Guardian Angels in the dizzy realm of darkness whose portals they so
jealously keep; the All Powerful by whose intervention the absent rise
up at our side, without our being permitted to set eyes on them; the
Danaids of the Unseen who without ceasing empty, fill, transmit the
urns of sound; the ironic Furies who, just as we were murmuring a
confidence to a friend, in the hope that no one was listening, cry
brutally: "I hear you!"; the ever infuriated servants of the Mystery,
the umbrageous priestesses of the Invisible, the Young Ladies of the
Telephone.

And, the moment our call has sounded, in the night filled with
phantoms to which our ears alone are unsealed, a tiny sound, an
abstract sound—the sound of distance overcome—and the voice of the
dear one speaks to us.

It is she, it is her voice that is speaking, that is there. But how
remote it is! How often have I been unable to listen without anguish,
as though, confronted by the impossibility of seeing, except after
long hours of journeying, her whose voice has been so close to my ear,
I felt more clearly the sham and illusion of meetings apparently most
pleasant, and at what a distance we may be from the people we love at
the moment when it seems that we have only to stretch out our hand to
seize and hold them. A real presence indeed that voice so near—in
actual separation. But a premonition also of an eternal separation!
Over and again, as I listened in this way, without seeing her who
spoke to me from so far away, it has seemed to me that the voice was
crying to me from depths out of which one does not rise again, and I
have known the anxiety that was one day to wring my heart when a voice
should thus return (alone, and attached no longer to a body which I
was never more to see), to murmur, in my ear, words I would fain have
kissed as they issued from lips for ever turned to dust.
This afternoon, alas, at Doncières, the miracle did not occur. When I
reached the post office, my grandmother's call had already been
received; I stepped into the box; the line was engaged; some one was
talking who probably did not realise that there was nobody to answer
him, for when I raised the receiver to my ear, the lifeless block
began squeaking like Punchinello; I silenced it, as one silences a
puppet, by putting it back on its hook, but, like Punchinello, as soon
as I took it again in my hand, it resumed its gabbling. At length,
giving it up as hopeless, by hanging up the receiver once and for all,
I stifled the convulsions of this vociferous stump which kept up its
chatter until the last moment, and went in search of the operator, who
told me to wait a little; then I spoke, and, after a few seconds of
silence, suddenly I heard that voice which I supposed myself,
mistakenly, to know so well; for always until then, every time that my
grandmother had talked to me, I had been accustomed to follow what she
was saying on the open score of her face, in which the eyes figured so
largely; but her voice itself I was hearing this afternoon for the
first time. And because that voice appeared to me to have altered in
its proportions from the moment that it was a whole, and reached me in
this way alone and without the accompaniment of her face and features,
I discovered for the first time how sweet that voice was; perhaps,
too, it had never been so sweet, for my grandmother, knowing me to be
alone and unhappy, felt that she might let herself go in the
outpouring of an affection which, on her principle of education, she
usually restrained and kept hidden. It was sweet, but also how sad it
was, first of all on account of its very sweetness, a sweetness
drained almost—more than any but a few human voices can ever have
been—of every element of resistance to others, of all selfishness;
fragile by reason of its delicacy it seemed at every moment ready to
break, to expire in a pure flow of tears; then, too, having it alone
beside me, seen, without the mask of her face, I noticed for the first
time the sorrows that had scarred it in the course of a lifetime.

Was it, however, solely the voice that, because it was alone, gave me
this new impression which tore my heart? Not at all; it was rather
that this isolation of the voice was like a symbol, a presentation, a
direct consequence of another isolation, that of my grandmother,
separated, for the first time in my life, from myself. The orders or
prohibitions which she addressed to me at every moment in the ordinary
course of my life, the tedium of obedience or the fire of rebellion
which neutralised the affection that I felt for her were at this
moment eliminated, and indeed might be eliminated for ever (since my
grandmother no longer insisted on having me with her under her
control, was in the act of expressing her hope that I would stay at
Doncières altogether, or would at any rate extend my visit for as long
as possible, seeing that both my health and my work seemed likely to
benefit by the change); also, what I held compressed in this little
bell that was ringing in my ear was, freed from the conflicting
pressures which had, every day hitherto, given it a counterpoise, and
from this moment irresistible, carrying me altogether away, our mutual
affection. My grandmother, by telling me to stay, filled me with an
anxious, an insensate longing to return. This freedom of action which
for the future she allowed me and to which I had never dreamed that
she would consent, appeared to me suddenly as sad as might be my
freedom of action after her death (when I should still love her and
she would for ever have abandoned me). "Granny!" I cried to her,
"Granny!" and would fain have kissed her, but I had beside me only
that voice, a phantom, as impalpable as that which would come perhaps
to revisit me when my grandmother was dead. "Speak to me!" but then it
happened that, left more solitary still, I ceased to catch the sound
of her voice. My grandmother could no longer hear me; she was no
longer in communication with me; we had ceased to stand face to face,
to be audible to one another; I continued to call her, sounding the
empty night, in which I felt that her appeals also must be straying.
I was shaken by the same anguish which, in the distant past, I had
felt once before, one day when, a little child, in a crowd, I had lost
her, an anguish due less to my not finding her than to the thought
that she must be searching for me, must be saying to herself that I
was searching for her; an anguish comparable to that which I was to
feel on the day when we speak to those who can no longer reply and
whom we would so love to have hear all the things that we have not
told them, and our assurance that we are not unhappy. It seemed as
though it were already a beloved ghost that I had allowed to lose
herself in the ghostly world, and, standing alone before the
instrument, I went on vainly repeating: "Granny, Granny!" as Orpheus,
left alone, repeats the name of his dead wife, is decided to leave the
post office, to go and find Robert at his restaurant, in order to tell
him that, as I was half expecting a telegram which would oblige me to
return to Paris, I wished at all costs to find out at what times the
trains left. And yet, before reaching this decision, I felt I must
make one attempt more to invoke the Daughters of the Night, the
Messengers of the Word, the Deities without form or feature; but the
capricious Guardians had not deigned once again to unclose the
miraculous portals, or more probably, had not been able; in vain might
they untiringly appeal, as was their custom, to the venerable inventor
of printing and the young prince, collector of impressionist paintings
and driver of motor-cars (who was Captain de Borodino's nephew);
Gutenberg and Wagram left their supplications unanswered, and I came
away, feeling that the Invisible would continue to turn a deaf ear.

When I came among Robert and his friends, I withheld the confession
that my heart was no longer with them, that my departure was now
irrevocably fixed. Saint-Loup appeared to believe me, but I learned
afterwards that he had from the first moment realised that my
uncertainty was feigned and that he would not see me again next day.
And while, letting their plates grow cold, his friends joined him in
searching through the time-table for a train which would take me to
Paris, and while we heard in the cold, starry night the whistling of
the engines on the line, I certainly felt no longer the same peace of
mind which on all these last evenings I had derived from the
friendship of the former and the latter's distant passage. And yet
they did not fail me this evening, performing the same office in a
different way. My departure overpowered me less when I was no longer
obliged to think of it by myself, when I felt that there was
concentrated on what was to be done the more normal, more wholesome
activity of my strenuous friends, Robert's brothers in arms, and of
those other strong creatures, the trains, whose going and coming,
night and morning, between Doncières and Paris, broke up in retrospect
what had been too compact and insupportable in my long isolation from
my grandmother into daily possibilities of return.Hence we have one immediate unexpected consequence of the telephone medium: it can produce exactly the opposite to the desired effect: the more he is told to stay the more he wants to leave. Other errors also occur, producing a kind of synchronicity (a second granny calling another young man with a similar-sounding name), as the narrator continues:

"I don't doubt the truth of what you're saying, or that you aren't
thinking of leaving us just yet," said Saint-Loup, smiling; "but
pretend you are going, and come and say good-bye to me to-morrow
morning; early, otherwise there's a risk of my not seeing you; I'm
going out to luncheon, I've got leave from the Captain; I shall have
to be back in barracks by two, as we are to be on the march all
afternoon. I suppose the man to whose house I'm going, a couple of
miles out, will manage to get me back in time."

Scarcely had he uttered these words when a messenger came for me from
my hotel; the telephone operator had sent to find me. I ran to the
post office, for it was nearly closing time. The word 'trunks'
recurred incessantly in the answers given me by the officials. I was
in a fever of anxiety, for it was my grandmother who had asked for me.
The office was closing for the night. Finally I got my connexion. "Is
that you, Granny?" A woman's voice, with a strong English accent,
answered: "Yes, but I don't know your voice." Neither did I recognise
the voice that was speaking to me; besides, my grandmother called me
_tu_, and not _vous_. And then all was explained. The young man for
whom his grandmother had called on the telephone had a name almost
identical with my own, and was staying in an annex of my hotel. This
call coming on the very day on which I had been telephoning to my
grandmother, I had never for a moment doubted that it was she who was
asking for me. Whereas it was by pure coincidence that the post office
and the hotel had combined to make a twofold error.McLuhan’s rapid guessing method will naturally cause him to see such phenomena as ‘traps’ – he is in such a hurry, he is bound to be tripping up all the time. He was taken in once or twice and is now rapidly guessing that the same holds generally. But if you see reading as a matter of interpreting mysteries, you will take things more slowly, investigate the contrasting features rather than being taken in by a putative sameness. ‘A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery’, says Joyce. Instead of unravelling Miles Mathis’s string, you linger over the difficulties, the ambiguities, which only resist you because of their richness. We are back with our notions of overgeneralization, hammers and nails.

.../...

[Foxie Loxie]

WHEW! Again! :facepalm: I figured this would be a good New Year Day's project, :Party: to catch up on what you are writing! I AM learning things about Joyce I didn't know & I get your point that we all change as we progress through life. I must say you ARE stretching my mind & that is good! I DID like the statement, "Their elitism is like the air they breathe, they simply don't see it." Kind of applies to what we see on the World Stage now. :idea: The telephone monologue zeros in on one of my pet peeves in this day & age; the lack of human contact in a meaningful manner. It seems people are just saying what they are supposed to be saying & there is no real contact on an individual level. Do we really want to become just robots?! ARE you a man of genius on your journey of discovery?! :unsure: It's late for me & I'm tired; hope you can make sense of what I wrote! :sleep:

[araucaria]

.../...

Here’s a shorter post to give New Year’s resolutions a chance :)

The likes of Ezra Pound and James Joyce offer the biggest challenge to both the rapid guesser and the slow interpreter, but while the latter will warm to the challenge, the former is likely to lose patience. Take a phrase from Finnegans Wake: ‘punns and reedles’: the speed reader, if he ever gets as far as page 239, will have to slam the brakes on in order to ‘guess’ at the primary meaning of ‘pins and needles’, which of course refers to a painful numbness such as he may well be feeling; the slower reader will latch onto ‘puns and riddles’, but still has his work cut out to fit that in with the rest of the sentence and the rest of the paragraph; also he will have gathered that the book as a whole has him in a sense tingling all over. It is a very long book, over 600 pages, and the last sentence leading back to the first sentence suggests the reader should go back and start again, making it literally a Sisyphean task; Sisyphus, you will remember, was condemned to pushing a rock up a mountain, and it would always fall back down again.

So the reader can carry on interpreting: the sentence begins ‘Lonedom’s breach is foulend up’. If McLuhan is expecting traps and looking for rituals, then he will find them in this kids’ singing game London Bridge is Falling Down (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Bridge_Is_Falling_Down). If one is expecting puns and riddles, then the next step might be ‘the city’ (a break for the lonesome) is ‘foul end up’, i.e. ‘is falling (upside) down’. Now take the whole sentence: ‘Lonedom’s breach is foulend up uncouth not be broched by punns and reedles’ [and could not be held or stitched together with the textile equivalent of ‘iron and steel’]. We are straying into Humpty Dumpty territory, a favourite nursery rhyme in these pages, and the stupendous cyclicity of world history, ‘rise afterfall’, is reduced to the level of child’s play. But you only play if you consent and are willing. The same paragraph beings, ‘These bright elects, consentconsorted, they were waltzing up their willside’ – consort with consent, up the steep hillside if you will; most will not bother, but lest any should, we have doorkeepers telling us ‘here be dragons’.

Read the whole book again? Maybe not tonight Josephine. Since it no longer matters where Sisyphus is on the mountain, he can just as well take his time, breach his lonedom for a while and take another look at this single sentence. When is a bridge not a bridge? When it’s a breach. This single pun encapsulates the entire novel, like any single element of a hologram. A bridge is the very opposite of a breach: it is a link over a breach. But this makes a river a breach, from bank to bank, when it may equally be seen as a bridge, a link from upstream to downstream. So the pun itself is a pin: that’s what it does; it bridges the gap between two separate things or ideas. You would never have thought there might be a connection between a needle and a riddle either, but a reedle suggests at a crossing point over water a reed bed that indeed does not mend or replace a bridge. What might do that however is a read bed of papyrus/paper with a pen instead: not punns and reedles then, but pens and paper, author and reader. McLuhan ought to approve: the medium really is the message, this novel is the Novel; but he would not be able to verify that using his speed-reading method; you need to give it however long it takes. Joyce was nearly blind for most of his life and it shows. His genius is based mostly on hard graft.

This is no bad thing, for if you remove the pointlessness and the punishment from the Sisyphus myth, you get the path of enlightenment: ‘chop wood carry water’. Today’s task is the same as every day’s, but today’s wood and water are not yesterday’s. Yesterday’s wood kept you warm and with the water, which also washed you and quenched your thirst, it cooked your food. Today you are cold, hungry and thirsty all over again. Such is life. You just bridge it from end to end, from start to finish, over and over. It just so happens that the female patron saint of Ireland who worked with St Patrick is St Bridget, Brigid or Brighid...

.../...

[araucaria]

JAMES ANGLETON, the ultimate conspiracy theorist

The next few posts somewhat unexpectedly move back into politics – not entirely unexpectedly, however, since the purpose of this thread is to explore the politicization of literature, whether it is done through some negative outside influence to suit a particular agenda (Mathis’s thesis) or through the internal workings of the writing process (my position), the latter also being a subversive activity, but not under outside control – which is actually what makes it truly subversive, and hence threatening to some. What is truly subversive to some is any manifestation of the divine feminine. Literature, poetry and the arts in general being at the forefront of that effort are almost by definition going to be targets. And great writers are going to be major targets, because what makes them great has nothing to do with a fancy prose style and everything to do with the expression of the divine feminine.

I have not been doing very well explaining McLuhan’s use of the word ‘ritual’ regarding the writers Mathis is attacking. And frankly, it not really my problem at all. It is really McLuhan’s problem, and/or Mathis’s problem in misquoting/misinterpreting/overinterpreting him. Nevertheless I intend to take a stab at the subject with reference to Ulysses. But before I come to that, I want to deal with Mathis’s association of ritual with Intelligence via secret societies. How might dealings with the CIA work out as a form of ritual? Sounds crazy, right? I’ll start with Mathis mentioning a poet friend of Pound’s and later head of counter-intelligence, James Angleton, whose Mexican mother gave him the middle name Jesus. Jesus! Maybe names are not totally unimportant, even at the CIA.

I have seen very little evidence in support of the Mathis hypothesis, despite the loud accusations. As we have seen, Joyce was a dead loss even as a passive source of intelligence. Hemingway was active, but the biggest fish he seems to have landed was a barracuda or maybe a shark, and his sole target was Nazis; he even changed sides to get a better look at them. Pound was befriended in 1938 by the younger Angleton, Angleton the poet, that is, son of James Hugh Angleton the OSS man. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Cinna the poet is the innocent victim of a revenge murder after being taken for Cinna the sinner (conspirator). I contend that James Angleton played the roles of both Cinnas in succession, changing from one to the other when the poet in him was silenced and the conspirator awakened – perpetuating the suppression of the divine feminine.

You are welcome to think that the 20-year-old Angleton became the handler of a mature 53-year-old writer of considerable notoriety and prestige, but it is such an unlikely configuration that I would need a lot more information about how it actually happened, along with concrete evidence regarding results. Here’s the deal. Pound turned against his own country in a manner viewed back home as treasonous. Either he was doing this on Angleton’s orders, which would also have been treasonous on Angleton’s part, would it not? – or he was not taking orders from Angleton: which is it to be? Another question would be: how was Pound’s conspiracy theory, for that is what it was, furthering a coherent prewar, wartime and postwar Intelligence agenda? Oh hang on: this raises another question: what might such a coherent agenda be? We are told that until 1945, it was anti-Nazi, and anti-Communist thereafter? How coherent is that? Let me disagree with the history books: in my humble opinion not very coherent at all.

From Ezra Pound’s standpoint, it doesn’t matter either way. It doesn’t matter whether Angleton was acting treasonously before or after Pound’s interventions: Pound was speaking with rectitude, i.e. consistent straight talk; it was Angleton who deviated at some stage. We saw above how

these commentaries often attacked Roosevelt and the Jewish bankers whom Pound held responsible for the war. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/ezra-pound Accusing Roosevelt of involving America in the war was valid in view of what we have since found out about Pearl Harbor. And banker involvement has been established in books like Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (http://www.reformation.org/wall-st-hitler.html). Pound was speaking the truth: did he get the truth from Angleton? Unlikely; he would have got deception from Angleton-the-spy. More likely Angleton got the truth from Pound, who had been doing what he was doing for decades. This is only conjecture until you read the actual Pound text that Angleton published in the one issue of his magazine Furioso: the same sort of reflections on money that I quoted earlier from his Cantos. It is not poetry at all, simply irrefutable quotes from John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington’s Constitution, followed by a couple of short paragraphs, all under the title ‘Introductory Text-Book ’ (‘James Angleton and Ezra Pound’ by Carolina Hartley: see this website (http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/10/james-angleton-ezra-pound/), where it is stated in commentary: ‘[B]These are the ideas that brought Pound 12 years in St. Elizabeth’s Hospital. Angleton deserves a lot of credit for publishing them in 1939’ (my emphasis)). Wow: that little bombshell establishes one fact, namely that Miles Mathis is correct in suggesting that one poet at least made the move from bona fide literature to hard CIA-type espionage/counter-espionage. A pity then that he failed to put the right name to his portrait: James Jesus Angleton.

So at this point, I am going in the opposite direction to Mathis Mathis: instead of looking at writers as (pretty useless) spies, I am going to look at a spy as a (pretty useless) writer/poet. The two activities are indeed poles apart: very briefly, the creative writer seeks to broaden his and our horizons, which the intelligence, and especially the counter-intelligence agent seeks to restrict.

On the subject of this middle name – pure poetry – the CIA (on its website, see below) dismisses the way everyone mentions it although Angleton himself never used it. A link in my previous post indicates how attached James Joyce was to having his birthday on St Bridget’s feast day (February 1st, spilling over into Feb 2nd), and having his books published on that day. Joyce was also very attached to his middle name Aloysius, after St Aloysius Gonzaga (http://www.catholicireland.net/saintoftheday/st-aloysius-gonzaga-1568-1591-patron-of-catholic-youth/), canonized along with a fellow trainee Jesuit called Stanislaus. Joyce of course trained for a while under the Jesuits, and Stanislaus Joyce was his brother’s keeper. The twin arrangement gets into [I]Finnegans Wake in various guises, such as ‘Enchainted, dear sweet Stainuless, young confessor, dearer dearest’( p.237). Another occurrence is in a paragraph referring to Pope Adrian IV, who infamously blessed England’s takeover of Ireland. Aloysius went to Pope Sixtus V for permission to join the Jesuits. Given that Sixtus means ‘sixth’ in Latin, this Pope Sixth the Fifth is the likely starting point for this sequence: ‘he looked the first and last micahlike laicness of Quartus the Fifth and Quintus the Sixth and Sixtus the Seventh giving allnight sitting to Lio the Faultyfindth’ (p.153). (True enough, while LI is 51st, the reverse is faulty: strictly speaking the forty-ninth of that name would be not the palindrome Lio IL but Leo XLIX.)

The subtext here seems to be that much more sense can be made of a given name than when you get to choose your own name and come up with nonsense. Innocent is possibly the most egregious example of alltime papal misnomers: in particular III and X come to mind. So Angleton, who was an angler (trout fisher) and ended up at lAngley, didn’t use his middle name? Given the name in question, it comes as no surprise that everyone but the CIA finds it interesting, and the least likely explanation is that he found it totally irrelevant to who he was. Of course, if, say, it meant that he had an ounce of good in him, then that might be something to be covered up, including by the man himself. The CIA is confusing two very different things, presenting the fact of non-use as a non-fact. Carolina Hartley again:

‘Angleton had some sort of breakdown in 1947 (...) In July [1948] James was called back to Washington to work in the newly-formed CIA’s counterintelligence division — despite deep depression. (...) Tom Mangold, another of Angleton's biographers, quotes a “Last Will and Testament” that Cicely Angleton says her husband wrote at this time:

‘“Life has been good to me and I have not been so good to my friends,” he [Angleton] confessed. He further requested that “a bottle of good spirits” be given to Ezra Pound, e e cummings, and other poet friends from Furioso days.’ This near-suicidal depression is explicitly put down to letting down his friends. Unfortunately good spirits doesn’t come in bottles. Here we have another implicit fact. Just as there is a middle name he didn’t use, there was a gun or a piece of rope that he didn’t use. What he did instead is on the public record: he worked for the CIA. His depression likely turned into the paranoia that had him seeing ‘the potential for communist infiltration everywhere’ that on its own admission actually hindered the CIA – hardly surprising: he was a sick man. There is indeed a psychiatric case in this story, but it was not Ezra Pound. What I am trying to explore here is seeing the man behind the legend, what made him tick, or rather what made him dysfunctional. When you deal with a legend instead of with the man, a normal meeting at the office becomes a religious experience. The CIA itself admits as much in the case of Angleton; from the CIA website (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol53no4/201ccunning-passages-contrived-corridors201d.html) :

– ‘Angleton was CIA’s answer to the Delphic Oracle: seldom seen but with an awesome reputation nurtured over the years by word of mouth and intermediaries padding out of his office with pronouncements which we seldom professed to understand fully but accepted on faith anyway.— David Atlee Phillip’Consulting the Delphic Oracle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphi) issued by the pythoness, a priestess under the influence of oleander smoke or possibly petroleum fumes, was notoriously dangerous not because it was unreliable, but because it was perversely all too reliable. When a king thinking of starting a war was told a great kingdom would be destroyed, he took that as a good omen, but the kingdom in question was his own. And the Oedipus story actually came about through two correct predictions, or rather the same prediction issued twice. The oracle was consulted first by his parents, and the answer got him out of the house; then again by his adoptive parents, which got him back in his parents’ house and his mother’s marriage bed. That is where acceptance on faith without a full understanding will get you. Except in the case of Angleton himself, who I contend, had Oedipal issues of his own still unresolved. To be sure, I do not have the credentials to make any diagnosis; but short of a proper diagnosis, I can and will present some evidence leading in that direction.

In my personal experience, depression is caused by not being where you need to be: being forced by circumstance to share views or activities that are not right, or at least not right for you. Relief comes when you get back on track. It looks like Angleton never did get back on track. Like Shakespeare’s Cinnas, Angleton the poet got terminated and Angleton the conspirator lived on. Angleton the poet was not blaming the Russians the way the conspirator did after the war (and his ghost lives on to this day it would seem). Unlike Pound, who was saying the same things both before and after the war, he was clearly caught up in the right-angle-turn in American policy that makes it in my view outwardly inconsistent. He was apparently not alone –

While Angleton struggled during his first decade at the Agency, Pound’s case became a cause célèbre for American literati. Former Furioso contributors like William Carlos Williams and Reed Whittemore lambasted Pound in the pages of The New Republic — which seems to have been a premiere literary outlet for writers close to CIA leadership. Archibald MacLeish even had the gall to ask “What happened to American literature?” (Carolina Hartley, also at http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/authors/Hartley-Angleton.html )The New Republic did however publish a more sympathetic account, ‘The Case of Ezra Pound’ by Jack LaZebnik (https://newrepublic.com/article/123283/case-ezra-pound) on April 1, 1957. But William Carlos Williams and Reed Whittemore likely did not qualify for a bottle of good spirits, for they would be friends Angleton was good to in other ways; for all that, Pound is the one who gets lambasted by Miles Mathis...

[awakeningmom]

I wasn't really sure where to post this, as this writer/researcher tends to go off on tangents and is talking not only about his concerns with Miles Mathis specifically, but also about a bunch of other "alt-media" personalities who he claims are limited hangouts (LH's) for various reasons (James Corbett, Sofia Smallstorm, Alex Jones, Joseph Farrell, etc.), including their pushing of the false narrative that Trump was a surprise upset to the PTB/MSM rather than the intended "winner" from the start. But I thought the title of this thread suggested this would be a good place to start.

The author, Allan Weisbecker, makes an interesting point about why he believes MM is a limited hangout/intelligence operative: Mathis' outright dismissal of the Pizzagate story in particular and the existence of high-level pedo/satanic rings in general. This dismissal by someone who should know better raises major flags for me too. There's just too much evidence showing that high level persons in all countries are involved in this dark sick weirdo stuff and too many links/connections/relationships suggesting that Pizzagate is (in most aspects) legitimate too. Read both parts I and II for the author's full analysis.

http://blog.banditobooks.com/what-happened-to-allan/

http://blog.banditobooks.com/what-happened-to-allan-part-two/

Apologies if this wasn't a good place to post....I haven't read through the thread yet.

[araucaria]

I wasn't really sure where to post this, as this writer/researcher tends to go off on tangents and is talking not only about his concerns with Miles Mathis specifically, but also about a bunch of other "alt-media" personalities who he claims are limited hangouts (LH's) for various reasons (James Corbett, Sofia Smallstorm, Alex Jones, Joseph Farrell, etc.), including their pushing of the false narrative that Trump was a surprise upset to the PTB/MSM rather than the intended "winner" from the start. But I thought the title of this thread suggested this would be a good place to start.

The author, Allan Weisbecker, makes an interesting point about why he believes MM is a limited hangout/intelligence operative: Mathis' outright dismissal of the Pizzagate story in particular and the existence of high-level pedo/satanic rings in general. This dismissal by someone who should know better raises major flags for me too. There's just too much evidence showing that high level persons in all countries are involved in this dark sick weirdo stuff and too many links/connections/relationships suggesting that Pizzagate is (in most aspects) legitimate too. Read both parts I and II for the author's full analysis.

http://blog.banditobooks.com/what-happened-to-allan/

http://blog.banditobooks.com/what-happened-to-allan-part-two/

Apologies if this wasn't a good place to post....I haven't read through the thread yet.
Hi there, awakeningmom, and thank you so much for your very interesting contribution. I was just about to make a transitional post (see below), so you are not disturbing the flow in any way. Let me see how I might connect your blogger’s rant (no criticism intended) to my more scholarly approach (just a different kind of earnestness).

First, he is dealing with the problem where a ‘glitch in thinking’ (his words) becomes something more sinister, such as a defence of Flat Earthers. I commented on FE only the other day, comparing it to ketchup (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?89423-Flat-Earth-Idea-Why-so-popular&p=1125028&viewfull=1#post1125028). We all have glitches in our thinking: my position is that we are all very much learning to think straight. See this post (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?94924-Some-anomalies-in-the-Miles-Mathis-material-an-alternative-picture&p=1123440&viewfull=1#post1123440). We think we’re smart: not yet, not smart at all yet. The elite, I suggest, are no smarter than the rest of us: they have simply taken dumbness to new levels. Dumbing down comes naturally to them.

You catch me at a juncture where I am discussing the CIA, trying to put the Intelligence into the Central Intelligence Agency, which seemingly doesn’t know what the word means. James Angleton was head of Counter-Intelligence for twenty years. In a secret CIA document from 2011, released in 2013, analyzing his ‘fixation on moles’, it says under Education: ‘college at Yale (graduating in bottom quarter of his class)’. ('James J. Angleton, Anatoliy Golitsyn, and the "Monster Plot": Their Impact on CIA Personnel and Operations', Studies in Intelligence, Vol 55, No 4, (December 2011) - just google the title) I put it to you that the guy was perhaps not very bright. And that the organization that left him in charge for all of two decades was perhaps not very bright either.

What is known as ‘intelligence’ in the secret services is anything but: it is raw data that can be interpreted smartly or otherwise. Angleton’s theories (the ultimate in conspiracy theories) merged into what was called the ‘Master Plan’ which others derided as the ‘Monster Plot’ – namely that ‘the United States and the Western world had been the targets of a vast, complex conspiracy that originated in the Soviet Union more than fifty years previously’ (p.39-40). This is all CIA operatives talking amongst themselves about internal business; the only connection with the outside world is of course Soviet spies, if any, within the CIA itself. They do have a bona fide ‘defector’ and a ‘plant’ at loggerheads: which is which? Angleton, the man in charge, makes the wrong call, thereby providing self-verification of the Master Plan/Monster Plot – being totally wrong made him absolutely right! This caused incalculable damage, and where this is all heading (see subsequent posts) is that the entire CIA registered the most spectacular (though largely unnoticed) catastrophic failure that any organization possibly could. Having been set up as the intelligence arm of the President of the United States, the worst thing it could possibly do was to destroy the very man/office it was designed to protect... and that is precisely what happened. The agency should have imploded, but did not. The same thing happened on a personal level to Angleton himself. He was suicidal to the point of writing a last will and testament, but somehow, instead of his unsound mind taking him to the cemetery, it took him to the CIA. At some stage, such an implosion will have to be triggered, but each missed opportunity takes the insanity up to a whole new level. Whatever that level actually is, judging by current affairs (the Soviet scare is back with a vengeance), the time is now.

The current next level up from Angleton’s non-existent all-powerful KGB is the impenetrable and impregnable ‘PTB’ as described by Allan Weisbecker, with several levels above what we actually see enabling them to handle the foreseen, the unforeseen and the (unlikely) unforeseeable.

The power/cabal/whatever I’m talking about is potentially above the sorts of pay grades that might appear to be in charge.
Those from whom no knowledge is kept.
Since the PTB are a group or more than one group that undoubtedly have disagreements among them – this will come up again and again – we also have to take into account the complexity of that sort of power, i.e., that there might be minor ‘secrets’ among them; I’m trying to simplify here, hopefully to make a worthwhile point.‘The Powers That Be’ as ‘those from whom no knowledge is kept’ is an entity that has no more reality for any individual than an Angletonian KGB. The concept itself is actually flawed. As we saw, we do have ‘more than one group that undoubtedly have disagreements among them’ – even within the CIA. Why do they disagree among themselves? Again as we saw, they disagree over converting raw data into intelligence. Weisbecker uses the word ‘knowledge’ as a synonym for secret service ‘intelligence’, in the sense of adequately processed data. The weakness of his analysis and therefore of his ‘Powers That Be’ is that as I explained, ‘knowledge’ is a synonym for raw data requiring smart interpretation.

We are here as part of the Cosmic Intelligence Agency to come up with the smart interpretation. The CIA had the smart (reality-based) interpretation but preferred Angleton’s insane one. So it is not enough to provide the smart interpretation: you have to formulate it with such power and conviction as to overcome the reticence and opposition of those influential crazies who do not want to know. That is the hard part.

As I see it, the NSA qualifies as a part of ‘those from whom no knowledge is kept’ in this restricted sense. It is a repository of all electronically transmitted raw data. This sounds very much like an artificial form of the ‘Akashic Records’, not usually presented as a bad thing. Also some branches of monotheism have no issue with an all-seeing God, especially when the deity is seen as benevolent. Another thought is that the secret services saved a whole lot of money when Facebook came along and people started volunteering their personal information without the need to spy on them. Bona fide sharing is a natural, healthy reaction to exactly the same data as unhealthy suspicion based on incompetence and jealousy (sour grapes). People are only just learning to open up and warm to each other much more than ever before. This is happening both individually and collectively. It is what I would call... anthropic global warming. :) Not for nothing are coldness, dourness, withdrawal, alcoholism and suicide roughly correlatable to more inhospitable environments and sunnier temperaments to sunnier climates. But there is also a historical component: any given community is likely to have seen an evolution towards greater warmth; a father today is much physically and emotionally closer to his family than in Victorian times (and unsurprisingly, the nobility are behind the curve). Likewise in politics, hot/cold war must and will evolve into détente and cooperation.

The Internet as the next stage in education after the printing press has led millions to express themselves publicly in ways they didn’t think they could. The choice is between standing up and with great conviction showing who you are, or sabotaging your own efforts on the basis that someone unwanted might be listening in. You cannot control your audience response, but your best chance of getting the desired positive response is by speaking out without inhibition, unambiguously presenting the real you in a grounded way. In contrast, Miles Mathis’s investigations into fakery are ungrounded, and even groundless, i.e. themselves a form of fakery, self-contaminated exactly like James Angleton’s fixation on moles. Weisbecker is right. You can take his raw data, as I have done, and rework it into something completely different and more intelligible. Weisbecker is also right in saying that MM is not alone; the alt media as a whole is part of the mix, to the extent that it fixates on fakery. But to avoid getting caught up in the process he needs to stop at some point and assert himself to be for real. That is what I am focussing on in this thread: great writers are for real; I know that because I am for real, and no one can take that away. This is what we mean by grounding. See this post (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?15915-Very-Disturbing-Jay-Weidner-Sacred-Mysteries-video--removed-&p=1125833&viewfull=1#post1125833).

[araucaria]

This shorter post on World War II is separated as a parenthesis/an interlude to my train of thought developing above in my last post but one and to be continued in my next post.

Let me first elaborate on this dogleg in Allied foreign policy as it moved almost seamlessly from combating Nazism to fighting Communism which I am suggesting was somewhat inconsistent, or at the very least questionable. The only direct path – apart from the current madness of actually inventing new enemies to replace old ones – would be to say that Nazi values were already in charge in the US and that Pound was appointed by Angleton to proclaim them from Italy. There is of course some evidence of the first part of this (and to date I have seen none of the second), in the shape of the German bankers on both sides of the Atlantic, notably ‘Daddy Warbucks’ – Paul Warburg, founder of the Fed in New York, his son James P. in Washington, and his brother Max in Hamburg. If all this were true, then the entire war against the Axis powers takes on a whole new meaning. If all this were the whole truth, then World War II was one huge false flag operation from start to finish, the real enemy from the outset being the Soviet Union. Either annexing/trampling across Germany and Italy was the most direct route to getting at Russia, and no more than that; or it was truly intended to eradicate Nazism, but the Russian ‘threat’ caused the anti-Nazi drive to be diverted by elements making off with the worst of the bunch instead of treating them as war criminals in the appropriate manner as advertised. The truth is of course doubtless somewhere in the middle: official government policy with an undercurrent of people implementing a different agenda which in wartime becomes treasonous. And there is also the time factor: at the time, there was only one narrative; it took years for the alternative picture to emerge. It may be simply a matter of change of POTUS and a change of policy when Truman took over from Roosevelt, whose presidency was neatly timed to end with the war. Except that Truman’s CIA was recruiting personnel from Roosevelt’s OSS.

Here is Carolina Hartley again on a veritable Jekyll and Hyde. The problem being of course, as we shall see in due course, that Jekyll’s monster is reproducible.

Angleton’s job in Italy involved ferreting out enemy informants and developing a spy network for the Americans. He worked with mafioso figures to do this and was part of re-instituting the corruption that Mussolini’s regime had got under control. Biographers of Angleton describe him as a polished anglophile who by day ran American mobsters over Italy looking for Fascists; and read Pound in the dark of night. This must have been a tortured time for Angleton. The “liberation” of Italy had dubious results and the government he served was persecuting a poet he respected. Angleton must have rationalized the situation to himself: bad methods would serve America’s greater good.
(...) Angleton’s new job with the Agency required him to root out communist spies inherited from the “Oh So Social” days of the OSS. http://www.counter-currents.com/2010/10/james-angleton-ezra-pound/ Wow. If, like me, you were wondering how a nice guy like Ezra Pound could support Benito Mussolini, now you know. I know very little more about the guy than I have set out in this thread. If, like me, you were confident, on the basis of character, that there must be an explanation, then you will feel vindicated and your powers of discernment will be boosted in preparation for some future occasion. This is not to say Mussolini was a saint. But Pound lived in Italy and knew things we don’t. And Angleton was raised in Italy and understood Pound, at least until he learnt that mobsters were his friends. Ideological warfare is all well and good, until you deal with the jokers in the pack: organized crime.

Jokers aside, I am not saying that it was unavoidably illegitimate for the Americans to turn on their Soviet allies after defeating Nazism. On the contrary, it is perfectly possible to be both anti-Nazi and anti-Communist: one well-tried way would be to pronounce both ideologies to be extremes and oneself a non-ideological centrist. While it would have been coherent to round up the German war criminals first, given the above, using them massively as a Cold War fighting force was more than simply opportunistic. What this meant for the Russians however who, remember, only entered the war when attacked by their ally, was that they could follow a consistent straightline policy of fighting Nazism in Russia then Germany during the War, and beyond during the Cold War. If there was anything consistent about enlisting the help of Communists to kill Nazis then enlisting the help of Nazis to kill Communists, it was simply the baseline position of fighting ideological wars. You can’t kill ideologies with a gun. You kill people. You don’t defeat nations, you covet their miles of farmland and confiscate miles of mud. Hitler at least knew what he was doing, which people he wanted to kill and which miles of mud he was going to confiscate; but his eyes were bigger than his stomach.

Seen from this angle, we get a better perspective on the war as a whole: in terms of armed forces and men on the ground, it was massively a Russo-German war, and any Anglo-American involvement was frankly a sideshow. German expansionism, the desire for ‘Lebensraum’ (living space), meant that Hitler would naturally look eastwards, to Poland, and the vast expanses beyond, into the Ukraine and Russia itself. It is not by chance that this is where nearly all the Jews were, hence a genocide of the Jews became a major strategic objective, instead of the ravings of an antisemitic madman that we get to hear so much about. The Russian campaign had two objectives: obviously to reach Moscow and topple the regime there, but also, on the way, to have the Einsatzgruppen carry out mass-murder operations, notably but by no means exclusively, on Jews.

That heading east was Hitler’s priority is evident from his first step: the invasion of Poland. Too much has been made of the false flag operation of disguising German soldiers as Poles; this was nothing more than window-dressing for German public opinion, otherwise they needn’t have bothered, because no one was duped by this act of naked aggression. It was a damp squib of a false flag compared with say Pearl Harbor, which duped most people for many decades. Why? because it was far too unsubtle, involved no diversionary element. Hitler was itching for Poland, say no more, and Hitler was the enemy anyway. Carry this argument further. Hitler had no inclination to invade boring old Belgium or to take on the world’s best-dressed army manning the Maginot line. Hitler had tasted French mustard gas in the earlier war and wanted no more of that. Unfortunately, the allies declared war, and unfortunately Hitler had a couple of gifted generals in Mannstein and Rommel who used Blitzkrieg tactics, already tested in Poland, to catch the French with their expensive pants down and give them a good hiding. Hitler reportedly said ‘I have never used the word Blitzkrieg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzkrieg), because it is a very silly word’. And he likely thought it was a very silly thing to do when facing in the wrong direction. So when his silly generals arrived at Dunkirk beach wanting to take the Brits home, he called them back. You don’t need to be a conspiracy buff to understand that this was not so much another moment of madness, a military blunder of the highest magnitude, as the political decision of someone not wishing to go any further off course. It looks like the Phoney War was the mutually preferred course. ‘The term "Phoney War" was probably coined by US Senator William Borah (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoney_War) who commented in September 1939 on the inactivity on the Western Front, "There is something phoney about this war."’ The same Wikipedia article quotes two authoritative Germans giving evidence under oath to save their skin:

At the Nuremberg Trials, German military commander Alfred Jodl said that "if we did not collapse already in the year 1939 that was due only to the fact that during the Polish campaign, the approximately 110 French and British divisions in the West were held completely inactive against the 23 German divisions."
General Siegfried Westphal stated, that if the French had attacked in force in September 1939 the German army "could only have held out for one or two weeks."These quotes are taken from this webpage (https://www.warhistoryonline.com/war-articles/the-japanese-invasion-threat-of-australia.html/2), which calls Failure to Attack Germany After It Invaded Poland the Allies’ biggest mistake. Some mistake: nearly as big as trying to fight on both sides of a war. I’m thinking that maybe the Allies were wary of making an enemy of the Soviet Union as well, as the Russians had invaded Poland from the other side only a couple of weeks after Germany. One way this might have played out was for the Allies to join the Nazis and hasten the invasion of Russia. But as it turned out, the Phoney War suited them just fine, until the hawkish Churchill entered the fray and Hitler himself intervened to secure his rear – secure his rear – as far as the Atlantic.

[araucaria]

JAMES ANGLETON, the ultimate conspiracy theorist (II)

The problem with ‘the truth’ is that it is rarely the whole truth; like other labels, it is overpretentious, it claims more than it delivers. ‘James Angleton’ is a label that may be adequate for the real person as far as it goes, but it stops short of the truth of ‘James Jesus Angleton’. As Alfred Korzybski wrote in Science and Sanity, ‘the map is not the territory’. A map may or may not mark roads or footpaths; car drivers will need roads but not necessarily footpaths, while hill walkers will need both; others may want neither. If you limit the real entity to ‘James Angleton’ as the CIA does, dismissing the rest as fictional, as opposed to potential or untapped, that means the culling machine has already been set loose on their own personnel. ‘Angleton the CIA man’ is even less than the real deal for the way it prunes away all the unwanted aspects of the family man, the poet, the gardener, aspects that are themselves not mutually exclusive in this way. Unfortunately for the CIA and for the rest of us, it was a dehumanized man making all those dubious decisions, not a robot – and another such who guided him through the War into the Cold War.

The problem is compounded by the fact that the ‘CIA man’ label is a Platonic ideal, a ‘one-size-fits-all’ concept; with respect to that ideal – which may actually be an undefined concept – any given operative is going to be no more than a best fit. This implies both a lack and a surplus; some qualities will be missing or deficient, others unwanted. Hence, with the best will in the world, and the best personnel available, the CIA is going both to fall short of the ‘ideal CIA’ and to contain non- or even anti-CIA elements in its midst. This is of course transposable to any collectivity, but in the special world of intelligence, the latter element will function as a background level of a phenomenon known in its more acute form as a mole. Interestingly, a mole is also a unit measuring the amount of a chemical substance involved, say, in a chemical reaction (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mole_(unit)). This is more than a simple analogy: what I am describing is a similar effect in what we call human chemistry. – An analogy would be to the arts: we are talking not so much about a finished painting, which is what it is, no more no less, as about a musical or dramatic composition, which is usually more, occasionally less, in terms of richness of meaning, than any given performance. On the other hand, in terms of dimensional fullness, any actualization is going to be infinitely richer than the concept, however elaborate; we are talking more in terms of an embodiment of a patent design or a building produced from an architect’s blueprint. – The CIA itself found Angleton oversensitive to this ‘mole-cular’, or rather molar effect (‘hyperconscious about security’, see below), and his oversensitivity appears to have been self-fulfilling or otherwise caused by his own input of too much ‘foreign’ material.

Angleton’s obituary (http://articles.latimes.com/1987-05-12/news/mn-7800_1_james-angleton)says this: ‘A number of senior CIA officials came under suspicion during Angleton's search for the elusive double agent, leading to inner turmoil and even an allegation that Angleton himself was the infiltrator. Then-CIA Director William Colby forced Angleton's retirement because the mole hunt was tying the agency in knots.’ The CI of Counter-Intelligence working against the CI of the CIA? He seems to have been tying himself in knots at any rate: the only reason I can see Ezra Pound, the alleged Nazi sympathizer, holding steadfastly to his views, and still in a mental hospital (as we know from multiple sources that he was) during these post-Paperclip years of massive Nazi infiltration of the CIA, is that Angleton and his ilk now considered him to be... a Communist.

More from the CIA website (https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol53no4/201ccunning-passages-contrived-corridors201d.html)
Biographical Backdrop
Before venturing into an analysis of how others have depicted Angleton, the salient facts of his biography should be presented. Angleton was born in Boise, Idaho, in 1917 and grew up mostly in Italy, where his father owned the National Cash Register subsidiary. He attended an English preparatory school before entering Yale in 1937. He majored in English Literature and edited a poetry review called Furioso that published the works of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and others. He entered Harvard Law School and then joined the Army in 1943.
Angleton was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services and first worked in the super-secret X-2 counterintelligence branch in London. It was here that Angleton learned to be so hyperconscious about security. X-2 was the only OSS component cleared to receive raw ULTRA material, intercepted German military communications sent via the Enigma encryption machine. He also knew about the DOUBLE CROSS and FORTITUDE deception operations that were paving the way for the Normandy invasion. The success of these operations was one reason for his later belief in Soviet “strategic deception.”
Angleton next served in the X-2 unit in Rome, where he was codenamed ARTIFICE. He was an innovative field operative and rose to be chief of all X-2 operations in Italy by the end of the war. When the OSS disbanded in 1945, Angleton stayed in Italy to run operations for the successor organizations to OSS. After he moved into CIA’s espionage and counterintelligence component in 1947, he became the Agency’s liaison to Western counterpart services. In 1954, he became the head of the new Counterintelligence Staff. He would remain in that job for the rest of his career.So far so good. But the following is a gem of convoluted prose. It talks about ‘a conundrum for the historian and biographer’, which is what apparently itself sets out to be.

What makes Angleton such a conundrum for the historian and biographer is that he was losing his sense of proportion and his ability to live with uncertainty right around the time, 1959–63, when it became startlingly evident — agents compromised, operations blown, spies uncovered — that something was seriously amiss with Western intelligence and more aggressive CI and security were needed. Given the Soviets’ record of success at penetration and deception operations going back to the 1920s, and with no current evidence to the contrary, Angleton was justified in presuming CIA also was victimized. However, there was no other source, human or technical, that he could use to guide him on the molehunt — only his favored source, KGB defector Anatoli Golitsyn, and their symbiotic relationship soon became professionally unbalanced as the manipulative and self-promoting defector’s allegations of international treachery grew more fantastical.
Overall, Angleton’s negatives outweighed his positives. First, among the latter: While he was running CIA counterintelligence, there were no known Soviet penetrations of the Agency besides “Sasha” (the extent to which Angleton deserves credit for that is arguable). Information from, or assistance by, him and the CI Staff helped uncover, or prepared the way for later discovery of, Soviet espionage operations in several Western countries. He maintained good relations with the FBI at the working level, helping mitigate longstanding interagency hostility fostered mostly by J. Edgar Hoover. And he contributed to the establishment of counterintelligence as an independent discipline of the intelligence profession with resources and influence at CIA.
The negatives preponderate, however. By fixating on the Soviets, Angleton largely ignored the threat that other hostile services posed — notably the East Germans, Czechs, Chinese, and Cubans. His operational officers were so deeply involved with defensive CI (molehunting) that they did not contribute nearly enough to offensive (counterespionage) operations. He became far too dependent on Golitsyn and consequently mishandled some cases (although in two of them, in Norway and Canada, the real spies were found eventually). He held to his disinformation-based interpretations of certain world events — the Sino-Soviet split, Tito’s estrangement from Moscow — long after they were discredited. His skill at bureaucratic infighting belied his administrative sloppiness. Lastly, he grew too isolated later in his career, and his security consciousness became self-consuming and stultifying for his staff.Let’s proceed with a few bullet points and take it from there:

• Angleton was ‘losing his sense of proportion and his ability to live with uncertainty’: a fair description of being overcome by a monster.

• This was ‘right around the time, 1959–63’: let’s not be so coy over names; they mean to include the Camelot era 1961-63: Castro, Cuba, Khrushchev, Jack Kennedy.

• This is ‘when it became startlingly evident’ (we are told exactly what that means) ‘that something was seriously amiss’; when exactly? The above period covers two different administrations. As it stands, the evidence started arriving in 1959.

• Angleton’s gradual deterioration is made to coincide with the startling evidence; when exactly? Again, it sounds as if it started in 1959. Why am I labouring this point? Because it suggests that if he had an issue with JFK (we shall see that he did), it was a problem predating JFK and therefore hardly of his making.

• Rather than mere coincidence, perhaps there is a cause-and-effect relationship through the interaction of Angleton and the current political situation? The obvious clash would be between the Communist activity by Castro, Cuba, Khrushchev, and Angleton’s trademark anticommunism. Is the name JFK as unmentionable as ‘Macbeth’, euphemistically and superstitiously known as ‘the Scottish play’? Not in other contexts, no. Why then does it becomes context sensitive in connection with Angleton?

• What also happened at the end of this time period 1959-63, when we stopped seeing agents compromised, operations blown, spies uncovered? The JFK assassination.

• Rather than mere coincidence, perhaps there is a cause-and-effect relationship? Giving the CIA a huge motive for killing the president. Is that what the coyness was about? Cui bono? And for the sake of balance – although obviously both outcomes were not possible – Kennedy’s determination to emasculate the CIA.

• ‘and more aggressive CI and security were needed’: this conclusion overlooks the previous statement that Angleton was getting out of control; doesn’t it suggest he was already overdoing the ‘aggressive CI’? Logically speaking, at this stage, his removal was maybe all that was needed.

• ‘Given the Soviets’ record of success at penetration and deception operations going back to the 1920s’: oh yes? not very competent are we? But what is being forgotten is that this is Angleton’s basic thesis we saw earlier: ‘namely that the United States and the Western world had been the targets of a vast, complex conspiracy that originated in the Soviet Union more than fifty years previously’. Clearly the plot is feeding off itself.

• ‘and with no current evidence to the contrary, Angleton was justified in presuming CIA also was victimized’: this makes no sense, it amounts to asking someone to prove a negative. Angleton had been chasing Communists within the CIA for several years, and not found any. Ergo, we have a problem. Er no, maybe we don’t have a problem; or at least if we didn’t have a problem, how would we ever know? This is often called fear-mongering.

• If you insist on having a mole and bring in a KGB defector to hunt the mole, then maybe you do have a mole after all, QED. Signs to watch out for: a manipulative and self-promoting defector; a symbiotic relationship; soon becoming professionally unbalanced; increasingly fantastical allegations of international treachery. Sounds like our KGB defector was doing a great job.

• ‘no known Soviet penetrations of the Agency on Angleton’s watch besides “Sasha”’: if this is supposed to be a ‘positive’, it is bad news. For a start, it is almost annihilated by the qualification ‘the extent to which Angleton deserves credit for that is arguable’; too true: Angleton himself would see it as a failure since his position was that the penetrations did exist but were unidentified. Then note the internal contradiction: no penetrations means no ‘Sasha’. Would infiltration by Golitsyn’s alleged mole ‘Sasha’ be put to Angleton’s credit as effective counter-espionage or would blame be attached on account of effective penetration on his watch? But then again, since the only place ‘Sasha’ may have existed was in Angleton’s head, this is probably just a fine example of Angleton tying the CIA in knots.

• No need to dwell on the preponderant negatives, the reds under the bed mentality, except to state that there is no way to prise apart Angleton the man from Angleton the CIA man; this was another symbiotic relationship that was not broken until the end of 1974 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Jesus_Angleton). Until then Angleton’s relationship with the CIA mirrored Angleton’s relationship with Golitsyn: joined at the hip – begging the question, Why?

That’s a lot of bullet points for a couple of paragraphs. I will just expand on the last point, about how difficult it is to get from the notion of the type ‘A. has a problem’ to the notion of the type ‘A. is a problem’. This can be seen as part of an extended sequence which might run as follows (and actually loop around): A. the man has a problem – A. joins the CIA – A. the CIA man has a problem – the CIA has a problem – A. the CIA man is a CIA problem – ... – the CIA is a problem.

I too have a problem, actually two. I have a problem with a young man interested in literature and poetry, who became friends with Ezra Pound – by all accounts (all but one) a lovely man, always eager to help his friends – but whose life took such a disastrous turn, beyond suicide. And I have a problem with an organization that has a certain theoretical legitimacy that it would have even if its actual embodiment had been corrupt from the outset. This may be the case for the CIA, but as the successor to other intelligence-gathering organizations, it did have a virginity, a clean slate, that it lost at some subsequent stage. With the individual on the one hand and the corporate entity on the other, we have a typical chicken-and-egg situation expanding into an unstoppable chain reaction or viral effect. Where did the damage start? We know that a single damaged individual can cause havoc in a community such as a workplace (a mole is an example of that), and that corporate personhood enabling gangsters to thrive better than many unregistered criminal gangs will provide a sink-or-swim environment for innocent new employees. So it is more a revolving door that works both ways – but still an issue offering no purchase. It seems in the present instance as though Angleton was contaminating the CIA, but only because the intelligence people got to him first. If this were the whole story, then the situation would indeed be dire. However, the same mechanism also operates for ‘healthy’ individuals, who congregate in healthy communities, legal fictions included, that can cope with and even improve a certain number of ‘unhealthy’ individuals. But how, when and where this mechanism might kick in to this picture is largely theoretical at this point.

Also from the CIA website, under the section ‘The Fictional Angleton’, meaning ‘Angleton as portrayed in works of fiction’ – as opposed to non-fiction, where you get ‘the “real” Angleton’, full of ‘gaps’ and ‘flaws and ‘lack (of) focus’ – we find this entry:

Aaron Latham, Orchids for Mother.
One of the reviewers’ blurbs on the paperback edition of this roman à clef declares that “some things can only be said in fiction, but that doesn’t mean they are not true.” The problem with that statement is that little the book says about its main character is true. Latham’s often outrageous novel about the bureaucratic feud between counterintelligence chief “Francis Xavier Kimball” and DCI “Ernest O’Hara” (William Colby) is the source of more misconceptions about Angleton than any other work — starting with the title containing his supposed nickname, which nobody ever used for him. Well, actually, I do have evidence dating from 1968 that this nickname was indeed used. In Georges Perec’s novel La Disparition, which has an undercurrent of espionage, (see this post (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?84692-Proof-of-time-travel-by-Jane-Tripp&p=1014637&viewfull=1#post1014637) for background), everything is ‘for Mother’, commemorating the author’s mother who died at Auschwitz. One of the characters showers his opera singer girlfriend with cargo planeloads of arum lilies (they might have been orchids, but the book avoids the letter E and the French word is orchidée). (Funnily enough, a couple of days after writing this, I find a topical link (‘demand your plane is filled with lilies’ (http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/fly-private-jet-order-food-jetsmarter-charter-plane-luxury-lifestyle-millionaire-liberace-music-pets-a7513571.html)) in the Independent) This is one of countless elements for which I have predicted a mother connection, but had so far not found in this particular instance. Of course the exact mechanism varies each time, but this is a clearcut example that actually includes the dedicatory element that is most often only implicit. Perec was picking the brains of a friend, the investigative reporter Alain Guérin. Meaning that he was likely using then unpublished and well as published material. There is little or no mention of Angleton in Guérin’s book, Qu’est-ce que la C.I.A.? (What is the C.I.A.?), published in 1968, when Perec was writing, but there is a whole small chapter devoted to him in his later book, Les Gens de La C.I.A. (The C.I.A. People, Editions Sociales, 1989). So it is not anachronistic to refer to this work.

Seeking to explain how Angleton’s career reached a peak that many others tried and failed to reach, Guérin puts it down to his status and corresponding mindset as a poet with a gift for ‘Byzantine plotting’, lending a ‘magic impunity’ to his wild constructions. He suggests in explaining this literary bent that it is somewhat in the nature of counter-espionage to work through a succession of working hypotheses but as they become further and further removed from reality, they would take on a life of their own just as some fictional character might take over control from their author.

The book contains a quote from William Colby, who suffered humiliations as Angleton’s pupil. The original reference is his book Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (1978), with the proviso that the 1978 French edition contains a number of details expurgated from the US edition (presumably the translator was working from the typescript). Here is Colby describing what Guérin calls Angleton’s ‘délire obsessionnel’ (delirious obsessiveness) (translating clumsily back from the French):

For Angleton, all our agents and their contacts behind the Iron Curtain were being manipulated by the KGB, and all the defectors who managed to escape were in fact sent by them, everyone came under suspicion even within the agency. (...) I did my best to understand and accept his crackpot theories about an all-powerful and everpresent KGB that with diabolical skill had infiltrated all our allies’ secret services and everywhere else placed countless fake defectors and agents provocateurs it used to influence and counter American policy. I confess I failed to do so. Not only were Angleton’s explanations impossible to follow, but most of all, he backed them up with thoroughly inadequate evidenceI now want to tie this all together in psychological terms: the repression of the feminine. According to the CIA, one of Angleton’s nicknames wasn’t Mother, or Orchids for Mother (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/695908.Orchids_for_Mother); but why would they need to say that? Only because someone (it just takes one person) had found him to be a bit of a mummy’s boy. This is the selfsame conflict that caused Aby Warburg to ditch a future career in banking and become an art historian, something that for whatever reason Angleton did not do. The thing about his passion for orchids is that the flower gets its name from the Greek word for testicle (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=orchid), on account of the two protuberances under the roots.


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Hence, the symbolism of the orchid would be: beautiful flowers above ground for Mother, produced by growing some underground coglioni for Corleone, or some balls for Father/godfather. So while nature has no trouble combining these two elements through the phallic stem, it would seem that the man had some difficulty reconciling the two poles. The secret services literally knocked the bejesus out of James – that doubtless embarrassing middle name from his mother’s side indicating the divine feminine. And they did something to put the angle in Angleton, stultifying his natural upward growth as a poet into a controversial spy catcher specializing in a different kind of ‘eastern plant’.

Guérin tells us that Angleton’s Counter-Intelligence/Counter-Espionage service was called ‘Sissy’ (pronunciation of CICE). I am wondering whether they were aware that in British English, a sissy or cissy is an effeminate or coward. He also tells us that Angleton’s wife was called Cicely, I note that CICEly is also readily abbreviated to Cissy... Incidentally Perec’s mother was called Cécile (Cyrla in Polish). Interestingly, Cécile/Cicely/Cecily/Cecilia is the patron saint of music and poets, and her feastday falls on... November 22. Alain Guérin mentions Angleton’s retirement home on the road to Langley, ironically very close, he says, to Arlington National Cemetery (ha! whatever is that supposed to mean? ...are we talking about JFK’s current address?), and his haunting of the CIA headquarters, where he and his friends (one of whom we will meet in my next post) continued to tout the Soviet infiltration meme notably by feeding intel to Edward Jay Epstein for his book Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald.

This may seem a very longwinded post to arrive at the conclusion that cold warriors and warriors generally have an issue with their feminine side. But this is not my conclusion; it is merely my introduction to what follows in another post – for which it may actually not be enough – and another post after that. I look at it this way: coming round to something so intuitively obvious is like spotting a familiar landmark: you know you have not lost your way. It is comforting to note that our spymasters are ordinary (flawed) human beings, and also unsettling to see how one man’s personal demons, his issues with his upbringing, can escalate out of all proportion all the way up to a planetwide threat from a largely imaginary enemy.

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