Eleanor Rigby, Wigan Pier

What's the difference between Motown and Tamala

Call Me Ishmael

Recently I've taken to using art as a tool for the manifestation of the collective unconscious in a Jungian sense, and so as Moby Dick has been prodding me for over a year now since Hong Kong, for reasons I couldn't quite fathom, I set up an RSS feed and curated a mood stream of every new piece of original art being shared with the world on the topic, and supplemented that with bits of data plumbing Jedi Knightery, to see if I can compile an emerging narrative. 

The learning so far is unsettling and an anomaly in expressionistic terms when looking back at history. It seems one of the key themes is not just the death of Captain Ahab and crew, but the death of Whales. Spooky whales levitating above the sea as if drawn in a state of mourning; lamenting the transit to a marine afterlife.

And then I awoke up from a nap just now, and for the umpteenth time was reminded of the book by The Guardian who week in and week out out are echoing the questionably tinnitus driven peals, ringing in my head and then out of nowhere, I realised the part of Moby Dick I had been so eager to share when reading this unusually off-topic novel for me that I find hard to follow. I overcame the age and relative formality of its language through the time tested clamour of Bangkok Go-Go bars. I find the neon, noise and nubility more soothing than when left a difficult text, alone in the distracting silence of home.

In any case, I meant to write how extraordinary it was learning of the whaling business in its heyday with respect to being the precursor for the entire edifice of imminent planetary industrialisation. That is to say, built upon the global scale of a wind powered floating business, in singular pursuit of yet another of natures exclusive and historically irreplaceable organic yields. If asked it is for this reason I argue leaving the oil in the ground instead of fuelling jet engines in the air for an economy levitating on the hologram of endless financial growth. What if say quantum entangled oil is the spice melange of a future interstellar life? To me, the what-ifs are a full nelson on the what-the-fucks line of reason.

I'll leave you with Melville's passage that left a slow burning mark upon me with a lesson on gateway drugs of the monkeys (homo consumericus) obsession with whale oil that was only displaced  when the black stuff leaking from the ground, looked like it had something going for it. 

Why did the Dutch in De Witt's time have admirals of their whaling fleets? Why did Louis XVI of France, at his own personal expense, fit out whaling ships from Dunkirk, and politely invite to that town some score or two of families from our own island of Nantucket? Why did Britain between the years 1750 and 1788 pay to her whalemen in bounties upwards of L1,000,000? And lastly, how comes it that we whalemen of America now outnumber all the rest of the banded whalemen in the world; sail a navy of upwards of seven hundred vessels; manned by eighteen thousand men; yearly consuming 4,000,000 of dollars; the ships worth, at the time of sailing, $20,000,000! and every year importing into our harbors a well reaped harvest of $7,000,000. How comes all this, if there be not something puissant in whaling?

Moby Dick - Chapter 24 -The Advocate

Christopher Knowles & The Secret History Of Rock & Roll Interviewed By Future Quake

Christopher Knowles - The Secret History Of Rock & Roll by Charlesfrith on Mixcloud

Why Does The Ancient Aliens Hypothesis Drive The High Priests Of Knowledge Completely Bonkers?

Mike Clelland interviews Christopher Knowles and riff on any number of subjects but the line that comes to mind is the question of why the Ancient Aliens hypothesis drives the  high priests of opinion shaping nut?. This is interesting because the ancient alien evidence is in some ways more robust than say the dream-like, trans-dimensional, culturally influenced, conspiratorial phenomena of today. We don't have the cuneiform tablets for the 20th century, we don't have the Nag Hammadi texts or the cultural purity of UFO cave and alien paintings where the pseudo cynic can't point to the influence of popular-culture media influence or the constantly twitter trending  psychological-hash-tag-theory-of-the-moment.

I find these audio interviews essential value for piecing together the mystery which spreads into every single thread of inquiry presented by the ubiquitous alien and UFO theme. It it a new archetype that is larger than the Trickster? Maybe it's a composite. A 21st century recombinant-culture archetype mashup working it's way through and threading together every culture and every facet of every culture, from the mass media of the military industrial govcorp complex to the oral tradition of the Dogon tribe of Africa or the Australian Aboriginals.

Fascinating & Infuriating. I am however most comfortable with alien abduction information. I find time and again that the tone of voice and extensive description of the enigma most real through this lens and so paradoxically I need the least evidence to convince myself. Tone of voice and conviction over time is where I find intuition more concrete than the flakes of empirical evidence we have.

The Trickster Archetype (Wave Particle Super Woo Duality)

One of the challenges about the poorly named UFO phenomena is how quickly and extensively it spreads into every area of super woo phenomena. I got into it by targeting quantum mechanics and mysticism for personal study at the beginning of the year and every trail led to UFOs or aliens at some point . As I was studying mysticism, hermeticism and gnosticism I thought it couldn't be that much of a side path to take a fun stroll down.

I couldn't have been more wrong.

And so it's important to say that I don't really find UFO's all that interesting. I find the possible occupants of these craft interesting and that interest doubled as I learned from the likes of Dr. Karla Turner and Niara Isley that the military has a close working relationship with, and is often performing the abductions to conduct experiments on people that are all about  the genetics, the genetics, the genetics.

So it's easy to be misrepresented as to what I'm interested in but the reality is I'm the last to have cause to complain because I've been deceiving myself. All along I've drawn the line at Cryptozoology because it's one thing to be exploring popular culture mysteries that have a military industrial complex trail of evidence, but did I really want to be investing time in Bigfoot and The Mothman prophecies? They just seemed so lo-tech to me and it is this that unveils my cultural bias.

Well, it took a British Midlander's point of view to hold up a mirror to myself because even though I don't wish to pursue CZoology (look I can barely bring myself to spell it out) as a subject I now accept that it's all one big overlapping Venn diagram clusterfuck overlap of super woo Rorschach testing and exploring of the self. Synchromysticism cranks up around UFOs, and UFO's crank up around Cryptozoology sightings and so on and so forth. You get the picture.

Listening to Nick Redfern and the likes of Christopher Knowles and Mike Clelland of late I've  had to accept that as much as I'd like to have nice neat lines of confusion the reality is I haven't got a clue what is going on with the multi dimensional and multiple tiered nuanced and highly contextual subject.

I guess I should have followed my own advice from the way back machine. Everything is contextual. The Trickster is at at play as author Christopher O'Brien explains to a witless interviewer in this interview and as Nick carefully relates below where he says 'it's not that it's just weird, it's too weird'. I didn't want to be here but here I am anyway so I might as well just accept it. It's not cut and dried. Nothing ever is.

Update: Below Nick Redfern I've posted a two part Christopher O'Brien podcast interview on a similar subject though there's some interesting 2012 perspectives in there too and below that (hopefully) is Mike Clelland interviewing Christopher O'Brien on stalking the trickster.

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