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When I began this project I was not a songwriter nor a musician, but a bodyworker and hypnotherapist deeply involved in storytelling as a way to create the growth of consciousness. The first song, POPPY TRAIL, was written in one sitting, following this mythical journey related by William S. Burroughs: Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. The last words of Hassan i Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain. Tamaghis ... Ba-dan ... Yass-Waddah ... Waghdas ... Naufana ... Ghadis. It is said that an initiate who wishes to know the answer to any question need only repeat these words as he falls asleep and the answer will come in a dream. Tamaghis: This is the open city of contending partisans where advantage shifts from moment to moment in a desperate biological war. Here everything is as true as you think it is and everything you can get away with is permitted. Ba-dan: This city is given over to competitive games and commerce. Ba-dan closely resembles present-dayAmerica with a precarious monied elite, a large disaffected middle class and an equally large segment of criminals and outlaws. Unstanble, explosive, and swept by whirlwind riots. Everything is true and everything is permitted. Yas-Waddah: This city is the female stronghold where the Countess de Gulpa, the Countess de Vile, and the Council of the Selected plot a final subjugation of the other cities. Every shade of sexual transition is represented: boys with girls heads, girls with boys heads. Here everything is true and nothing is permitted except to the permitters. Waghdas: This is the university city, the center of learning where all questions are answered in terms of what can be expressed and understood. Compete permission derives from complete understanding. Naufana and Ghadis are the cities of illusion where nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted. The traveler must start in Tamaghis and make his way through the other cities in the order named. This pilgrimage may take many lifetimes. CITIES OF THE RED NIGHT, William S. Burroughs, pages 158-59) HASSAN I SABBAH is referenced to The Old Man of the Mountains, the Master of Assassins. The Old Man was an 11th century historical figure who escaped capture by a angry potentate, holing up at the fortress of Alamont, in what is now Northern Iraq. Head of the Ismaelite Cult, the Old Man was said to possess such psychic power that he could give the order for an assassin to hit someone as far away as Paris, by whatever unknown channel is used by men with these powers. The legend is that he did not initiate attack, but waited for the moment when the enemy initiated attack against him. He knew the mind of the one who would destroy him, and when the order was given for his assassination, he turned the tables, having his assassin already in position, awaiting the order sent by some unknown power the Old Man possessed. Burroughs: How did the Old Man convey the death order at a distance? The word telepathy is misleading. Organic communication would be a more accurate designation, since the whole organism is involved. You transmit and receive as much with your big toe as you do wtih your brain and what is transmitted is a strong emotional reaction, not neural data like triangles, circles and squares. For more information on this power, read, AMAZON BEAMING, by Petru Popescu. It details National Geographic photographer Loren McIntyre’s experiences lost in the Amazon jungle with members of the Mayoruna tribe. They were stone age people who had no language in common with him or anybody else. But the head man was talking to him “in his head” and hearing him as easily as if they were speaking English aloud. McIntyre, who is also credited with discovering the source of the Amazon, told Popescu, a Czech novelist, about this adventure while the two men were sailing with Jacques Costeau. One of the stories told about Hassan i Sabbah is that he used a trick to get his recruits to lay down their lives for him, at his command, without hesitation. He got them high on hashish (origin of the word assassin) and had them brought to a compound which was decked out as heaven. There were beautiful orchards, gold and silver, rich tapestries, beautiful women, etc. Sort of a precursor of the Playboy Mansion. They were told this was where they would go if they died in his service. Here is a passage from Burroughs THE PLACE OF DEAD ROADS, which is the heart of Hassan i Sabbah’s Night Song: Don Juan lists three obstacles or stages: Fear ... Power ... and Old Age ... Kim thought of old men with a shudder: drooling tobacco juice, spending furtive hours in the toilet crooning over their shit ... The only old men that were bearable were evil old men like the Old Man of the Mountain ... He sees the Old Man in white robes, his eyes looking out over the valley to the south, seeking and finding enemies who would destroy his mission. He is completely alone here. His assassins are extensions of himself ... So Kim splits himself into many parts ... He hopes to achieve a breakthrough before he has to face the terrible obstacle of old age ... So here is Kim making his way through the Old West to found an international Johnson Family ... Being a Johnson is not a question of secret rites but of belong to a certain species. Hes a Johnson means that he is one of us. Migrants fighting for every inch. The way to Wagdas is hard. The great victory and the fall of Yas-Waddah are but memories now, battles long ago. (THE PLACE OF DEAD ROADS, William S. Burroughs, pages 201-03) In PASS THE AMMUNITION, the idea is that there are men who have moved spirit into matter, members of the Johnson Family, who are not ruled by ideals, but by the reality of the patterns of the collective unconscious, and by the requirement of consciousness that these patterns be played out in the reality of war and similar criminal activity, or in the intelligent alternative of ritual. But these rituals have to be consciously acted out, and we need to know why we do them, to avoid dropping back to the old unconsciousness of power inflation and shadow projections of our own evil. One of the most effective ways to play out these patterns is in plays. Shakespeare underlies the greatness of Britain’s civilization, the Greek civilization rested on plays which acted out such tragedies as infanticide, matricide, patricide and other activities best peformed ritually in dramatic constructions. The failure to do this leaves only the shadow projection or acting out in reality as an alternative. For example, all mammalian females have the instinct to destroy a newborn in time of scarcity as well as the instinct to nurture in time of abundant food supply. The dark side of instinctual behaviors are called atavistic behaviors. Those women conscious enough to know this, and not deny the dark side of motherhood, do not unconsciously act it out, or project their own babykiller onto other women. When I was in analysis with Dr. Henderson, one of the first things he told me was that after WWI in Europe, the idea in western intellectual circles that we can get rid of evil was discarded. It was recognized that those who think they are good, and somebody else is the evil one, are actually providing the energies which can then be unconsciously taken on as projection by some relatively ignorant political leader, who acts out on a large scale, as did Hitler and Stalin. By being conscious of one’s own instincts, especially those which cannot be allowed in civilized society, one keeps an eye on one’s own evil, and doesn’t let it hurt innocent people. This is the secret of the Yin/Yang symbol: the spot of white in the dark and the spot of dark in the white is one’s awareness, always, that one is also the opposite of the ego position. If you don’t know that, you get involved in trying to defeat or lock up all the evildoers, not realizing it’s your own denied evil you’re trying to escape responsibility for. There’s the same idea in the New Testament: [Matthew 7: 1-6] Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye, Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye. Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye. Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. ERASERHEADS BABY has references to my favorite filmmaker, David Lynch, of course, whose ERASERHEAD was a brilliant first film. The English screams in the Chinese night lyric does derive from SHOGUN, which was set in Japan and not China. I changed the lyric to reflect the agony the western mind is going through trying to stop moving between inflation and deflation, and find the yin yang balance that is essential to the Chinese thinking. One of the Easlen Institutes catalogues suggested that the most important thing to happen in the last century was the integration of eastern and western thought on the west coast of the United States. The story I like which displays Chinese thinking is this one: There were eleven Chinese generals voting whether to retreat or attack, and eight voted to retreat, three to attack. They attacked. Because the qualitative value of three, the value of the number as a symbol of unity, outweighs the quantitative value of the number eight. The western mind tends to be unconscious of anything except the quantitative value, reflecting the linear thinking of the left brain (right side of the body) and ignorance of the right brain (left side of the body.) Understanding this brings light to what constitutes the Right Wing of the political spectrum and the Left Wing of that spectrum. Eleven (the number of generals) is the number of the Tao, representing the completion of the decade or first numerical set and return to one. REAL EYES is set in cyberspace, specifically mentioning Mister J’s, a cyber nightclub in OTHERLAND by Tad Williams, in which people are represented by Sim suits of every description, which may or may not have anything to do with their actual physical reality. FOLLOW THAT TRUCK, begins and ends the album, with the dream I had about Burroughs on the night he died, in which he said he didn’t need a driver, because he could drive himself. This album came together from intent, beginning with my writing the songs, then with Clay Hawkins becoming my teacher as I began to learn to play the guitar and sing. He played brilliantly and showed me how to record and mix. He also helped me improve the chord structure on Hassan i Sabbah, Real Eyes and Head Over Heels. He created the music and did the vocal on Planet Janet, and he played hand drum on some tracks. His friend Bhima Light showed up from Canada one night and put some drums (Irish Bodhian), mouth harp and didge on selected tracks. Then my friend Bruce Gordon, who plays professionally with the Zydeco Flames, added the Hammond B-3 organ (Planet Janet, Eraserheads Baby and Pass the Ammunition), piano (Follow That Truck and Head Over Heels), and the accordian (Real Eyes). Everything was recorded on a Yamaha MD8 recorder in an apartment behind the Hulu House Vegetarian Restaurant in San Francisco. Dan Lee Summer 2003 |
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