more PoS art conspiracy stuff
phanero
http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/poseur3.html
although I must admit to it having some entertainment value.
Including Roussel is just patently false, as are many of the others i'm sure,
although Yeat's magical life is well documented, and the Verne book sounds interesting.
Oh I suppose its all true! hehe Conspiracy theorists have such a bizarre talent for inclusion
in their schemata which i adore... at any rate, I did
find this page http://www.hum.au.dk/ckulturf/pages/archive/projects/jb.html (from the Grasset D'Orcet mention)
which i was keen to read as well. I was just reading some of Max Jacob's letters this afternoon..
but Andre Malraux was in the Foreign service.. and Why no mention of the meeting between Roussel and Mussolini
in his custom "RV".. Reality is always weirder than the conspiracy..
The Angelic Society: Three recent French books, Jules Verne: Initiate and Initiator by Michael Lamy, Arsene Lupin:
Unknown Master by Patrick Ferte, and Fulcanelli and the Black Cat by Richard Khaitzine, seem to suggest that the PoS
came into being as a sort of artistic society, uniting the Bohemian avant-garde artists of Montmartre (the Symbolists,
the Surrealists, and the Romantics). Apparently, these musicians, writer-poets, dramatists, and painters were
interested in common themes, and in the Rabelaisian technique of using Grasset D'Orcet's "language of the birds"...
creating puns, rebuses, and riddles for the purposes of satire, social criticism, and concealing knowledge. In the works
of disparate creative people such as Honore de Balzac, Maurice Leblanc, Jules Verne, Raymond Roussel, Erik Satie, Pablo
Picasso, Max Jacob, Valentine Gross Hugo, Marc Chagall, Gerard de Nerval, Maurice Barres, Josephin Peladan, Claude
Debussy and "Les Six," Comte Robert de Montesquiou, Victor Hugo, Jean Cocteau, Charles Nodier, Stephane Mallarme,
Maurice Maeterlinck, Jean-Julian Champagne (Fulcanelli), and perhaps even Pataphysician Alfred Jarry, can be found the
techniques and interests we today associate with the "Priory of Sion". Lamy says that many of these people belonged to a
group he calls The Brouillards (The Clouds) or the Angelic Society, of which the PoS is a modern manifestation. They are
descended from the Gouliards, or medieval clerks and print-makers, whose mystical and heretical Cathar watermarks so
fascinated Harold Bayley. Robert Anton Wilson also feels that a number of these people may have also belonged to the
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor.
Some interesting facts: Balzac's Unknown Masterpiece is about a secret known to only two painters, Poussin and Pourbus;
and appears to have been the inspiration for an occult masterpiece by Picasso. "Croise" Andre Malraux appears to have
been part of an aerial expedition to discover the palace of the Queen of Sheba in Yemen, a feat which he was
congratulated for by Haile Selassie of Ethiopia; as Minister of Cultural Affairs, he helped organize an archaeological
expedition to Gisors in 1964. Leblanc's work The Triangle of Gold has the same name as a "prieure document" created by
Jean-Luc Chaumeil in 1979. Satie left a strange note behind saying he was part of a society descended from the Knights
Templar and the Protectors of the Holy Sepulchre. Barres' most famous work is La Colline Inspiree, about Sion-Vaudemont
and the Baillard Brothers. In one of de Nerval's works, he said that he saw a star rising from the sea, and written on
it was the name "Merovee".
Surrealism and the Oulipo
Increasingly, I am finding more evidence of Surrealists at work in this mystery. Henry Lincoln first pointed out that
Cocteau's Mural in Notre Dame de France seems to have a pentagram centered on Cocteau's forehead. My research suggests
that this pentagram is a reference to Cocteau's surrealist colleagues, Guillaume Apollinaire, who had a star-shaped
wound on his head, and Raymond Roussel, who wrote a play, The Star in the Forehead. The Mural also contains a Blue Rose,
which is an apparent allusion to a Russian Symbolist art group that influenced Marc Chagall and other painters.
According to Simon Miles, the Surrealist poem Le Serpent Rouge contains symbolism from Jung's _Mysterium Coniunctionis_,
which was of key interest to Surrealists. Most importantly, Gerard de Sede in the 1940s belonged to two Surrealist
groups, Les Reverberes and La Main a Plume. Members of these groups would go on later to form the Workshop for Potential
Literature (Oulipo) in the 1960s. Oulipo was interested in cryptograms, ciphers, textual reversals and inversions,
geometric figures in paintings (Oupeinpo), and one key Oulipo text even used the Knight's Tour of the Chessboard as a
organizing device. Jean-Pierre Deloux seems to be connected to Oupolipo, the offshoot of Oulipo devoted to creating
detective police fictions. And Philippe de Cherisey seems to have written several articles on Alfred Jarry, the founder
of the Surrealist College de Pataphysique.
Alan Sondheim
- Alan
For URLs, DVDs, CDs, books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt .
Contact: Alan Sondheim, sond...@panix.com, sond...@gmail.com. General
directory of work: http://www.asondheim.org .
phanero
Grasset D'Orcet's "language of the birds"...
(see below) & if you look down into the names, you'll see Mansur al-Hallaj
who as all fans of Hakim Bey know is the heretic who was burned
for the heresy "I am the Truth" (Ana l'haq).. It makes me wonder if there couldnt
be a kind of unknown shadow sufism, an eblisian counter sufism of which the
current fundamentalism is but a shell. Its quite silly to concieve of such a thing,
but when you look at the structure of "I am the truth," or "I am God." you can see
the echoes of the angelic "fall" which also echoes "The Angelic Society" in a fallen
sense. And how Jihadi suicide is seemingly pretty mystical from the inside, although
there are probably Sunni radical communists who have no real belief in the afterlife. If its possible
to think of, its probably true! Its quite ridiculous, of course, but one wonders about weird calligraphy of human
social coding, how it bulges in these diastolics.. Today I've been studying the Kerenyi's
brilliant analysis of the origin of comedy as a kind of diastolic bulge, a primitive
form of dialecticalism, or perhaps an unconscious dialectic, which brings up the whole
notion of deep structure i guess, and "organic dialectic".. comedy's formlessness being older
than tragedy but its formalization arising from a diastolic with tragedy.. anyhoo
frontline had a pretty good Al Queda show on tonight.. I watched that, and I got this
odd sensation when they had this tape which was telling the al queda listener, "My voice is
entering your body.." How viral can you get? And then there was this member of a traditional
sunni group who was talking about how many of these people were being radicalized (read virulized) in
Europe instead of in the middle east http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/front/view/
which made me think of a kind of ressentiment. Nietzsche's genealogy of ressentiment as
the moral perversion resulting from the ancient Roman/Palestinian cultural conflict and giving
birth to the ascetic ideal affect/ or maybe some variant. And at one point one of the virulent
anti-westerner muslims specifically called the west "Rome".. the whole thing was really evocative.
But you know, its frontline, so what are you really getting, but well.. it made me think a few
new things i suppose.. oddly, the piece alsmost makes you think these people are being radicalized
because of cultural alienation, they called it homesickness in the show.. so they go to a mosque and get infected
with radical islam..but they don't really address the engine of radicalized islam, they never do of course.
i mean they put it almost like that, which sort of made me think, THEY are trying
to portray this as a simplified virus vector, as a reductionism in the service of, as against what i concieve of as a
memic complexity involving historical agency, at any rate, some weird spiralling fractals came out of that..
its a pretty decent blip.. the whole show is online too..
The Speech of the Birds
Mantiqu't-Tair
Presented and translated by: PETER AVERY
Mantiqu't-Tair is one of the masterpieces of Persian literature of which a complete and annotated translation into
English is here presented for the first time as The Speech of the Birds. The text revolves around the decision of the
birds of the world to seek out a king. Their debilitating doubts and fears, the knowing counsel of their leader Hoopoe,
and their choice of the Simurgh as a king, is in reality an allegory of the spiritual path of Sufism with its demands,
its hazards and its infinite rewards. The poem contains many admonitory anecdotes and exemplary stories, including
numerous references to some of the early Muslim mystics such as Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, Abu Sa'id ibn Abi'l-Khair, Mansur
al-Hallaj and Shibli, among others. In The Speech of the Birds, Peter Avery has not only given us a precise and moving
translation, but also ample annotation providing much information to fill in what Attar would have expected his readers
to know. The result is a fascinating insight into a remarkable aspect of Islam: the world of ecstatic love of the
Persian mystics. The Speech of the Birds will be of interest to everyone who values great literature, as well as to all
students of Persian and Sufism.
Brought up in a Sufi ambiance, the author of this work, Faridu'd-Din Attar (1145-1221), was an apothecary who lived near
Nishapur. Attar, whom legend describes as having taken to the Sufi path in earnest after he witnessed a dervish
surrender his soul outside his shop, went on to become one of the most famous Sufi poets in history, best known for his
classical work the Mantiqu't-Tair.
phanero
The strongest testimony in favor of Aristophanes is that of Plato, who, in one of his epigrams, says that "the Graces
chose his soul for their abode." The philosopher was a constant reader of the comedian, sending to Dionysius the elder a
copy of the Clouds, from which to make himself acquainted with the Athenian republic. This was not intended merely as a
description of the unbridled democratic freedom then prevailing at Athens, but as an example of the poet's thorough
knowledge of the world, and of the political conditions of what was then the world's metropolis.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alan Sondheim" <sond...@PANIX.COM>
To: <WRYT...@LISTSERV.UTORONTO.CA>
Sent: Tuesday, January 31, 2006 9:12 PM
Subject: Re: more PoS art conspiracy stuff
Halvard Johnson
"Crash"), herewith are my notes on Bush's State of the Union
message:
Ladies and gentlemen, blah, blah, blah. I . . . blah, blah, freedom,
blah, blah. And blah before blah blah blah-blah. Renew the blah,
blah Patriot Act blah, blah. Make blah blah tax-cuts permanent,
blah blah. Save Social blah Security blah. [Smile.] Bipartisan
blah solutions blah, blah.
[applause]
Open blah markets, people everywhere Buy American. American
worker rah, blah. [applause] Secure borders, blah, guest worker
program--no amnesty. Our government providing health care
for poor and elderly, blah. Blah.
Hey, where's that remote? Who changed the channel?
Okay. Blah, blah, blah. Addicted to oil. Clean, safe nucular
energy. Better batteries. Blah, blah. Ethanol for everyone
within six years. Blah.
Teach our kids math, blah, and science. Blah, blah. Creative
minds supported. Tax credits for all. Blah. Innovation, yea!
No behind left unchilded. Blah, blah, blah. Abstinence, rah.
Yada, yada, yada. No declining, no unraveling. New
Justices, rah! Servants of law. O'Conner, bye. Alito, hi!
Be good. No clones, no making centaurs, buying embryos.
Thanks and blah, blah -- God bless America. And blah pray for
stronger levees.
Hal
Serving the tristate area.
Halvard Johnson
================
hal...@earthlink.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~halvard
http://entropyandme.blogspot.com
http://imageswithoutwords.blogspot.com
http://www.hamiltonstone.org
Allen Bramhall
> .
>
> Yada, yada, yada. No declining, no unraveling. New
> Justices, rah! Servants of law. O'Conner, bye. Alito, hi!
>
> Be good. No clones, no making centaurs, buying embryos.
> Thanks and blah, blah -- God bless America. And blah pray for
> stronger levees.
>
>
>
> Hal
shame about the centaurs. are you sure he wasn't beseeching Yoda to save us?
Allen
phanero
heal the sickblah! raise the deadblah!
Who's Amerigo Vespucciblah?
blah-wah,
lq
I kind of wish we had a weirdo singing dictator
like on Pink Floyd's The Wall..
but
He'd look like Mr. Clean and croon the whole thing
from a little golden balcony which would burst forth
in much grue from a giant eagle chest!
Green skinned Uncle Sam Midgets could form a chorus line
and sing in umpa-lumpa langue
"I want you-I want you"