A Report on The Final Academy by Matthew Levi Stevens

Contribution to thee archive from Matthew Levi Stevens.

A Report on The Final Academy

Matthew Levi Stevens

17^th October 2012 saw the publication of ACADEMY 23: an ‘unofficial’ celebration of William S. Burroughs & The Final Academy, compiled & edited by Matthew Levi Stevens & Emma Doeve of WhollyBooks. Contents included:

- Articles, Essays & Reviews from Michael Butterworth of Savoy Books, John Coulthart, Paul A. Green, John May, Mike Stevens, and David S. Wills

- New & Previously Unpublished prose material from ‘Here To Go’ Show veteran Joe Ambrose, William’s former Naropa companion, Cabell McLean, and editor Matthew Levi Stevens

- An Account of a Conversation with William S. Burroughs about Books & Magic, which took place at the time of The Final Academy

- An Exclusive Interview with Phil Hine, in which he talks about visiting William S. Burroughs, and his relationship to Chaos Magic

- Photos of a visit with Brion Gysin in Paris from former Psychic TV associate Bee, and of shooting in Lawrence, Kansas, with Uncle Bill from Spencer Kansa

- Original Artwork by Emma Doeve in response to The Wild Boys

- Extracts from an Interview with Terry Wilson on meeting William & Brion, Here To Go: Planet R101 and finishing Perilous Passage

As well as its announcement online, Academy 23 also had a launch at the event FINAL ACADEMY/2012 @ The Horse Hospital, Bloomsbury, London on Saturday 27^th October, 2012. Organised by Joe Ambrose (who also co-produced Destroy All Rational Thought and 10% File Under Burroughs with Frank Rynne, and is himself a contributor to Academy 23), the evening featured Films, Music & Spoken Word:

‘Words of Advice: William S. Burroughs On The Road’ (directed by Lars Movin & Steen Møller Rasmussen) which featured previously unseen footage of Burroughs on tour in the late 80s, plus rare home movies of Burroughs in Kansas towards the end of his life. Contributors include Patti Smith John Giorno, Islamic Diggers, and Bill Laswell;

‘Language Virus’ by celebrated graffiti artist Raymond Salvatore Harmon, with music by Philipe Petite;

Soundtrack for the event provided by Testing Vault, The Plague Doctors (featuring Mix by DJ Raoul), Islamic Digger No1. One Way, Alma featuring Joe Ambrose;

In addition there was Discussion, Introductions, & Readings from Author & Poet Paul A. Green, Artist & Kinetic Sculptress Liliane Lijn (who knew Burroughs & the Beat Hotel regulars in Paris in the early 60s), ‘Post-Industrial’ veterans Scanner & Matthew Levi Stevens, and novelist Tony White.

Both Publication & Event received endorsement from original prime-mover of The Final Academy, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, who sent the following email of encouragement & support:

Dear Matthew,

How great to hear from you! We really DO appreciate your mentioning our work in staging the First Final Academy. The original idea we had was to HOPE that further variations would occur. After so long it is good to see the meme expanding. we hope we see the book when it is finally out and wish you every success and FUN in all these activities.

Genesis

"VIVA LA EVOLUTION !!!"

‘Academy 23’

In the Beginning was the Word . . . In this case the words that William S. Burroughs wrote for British ‘men’s magazine’ Mayfair while he was living in London in the 1960s. Some years previously a young aspiring writer called Graham Masterton had written to Burroughs when he was still living in Tangier. By 1967, Burroughs was living in London and Masterton, who had landed the job of deputy editor for Mayfair, visited him at his Duke Street, St. James apartment to ask if he had any material he would like to contribute:

“He had long had the concept of an academy at which he could expound and discuss his ideas on government repression and big business and the future of social control, so I suggested that he write a series of articles which we would call The Burroughs Academy.”

The theme of an “Academy” where the young could be taught “a true and different knowledge” was one that engaged Burroughs increasingly as the 60s Revolution progressed. At the height of the Counter-Culture, he even entertained the notion of purchasing Boleskine House on the shores of Loch Ness, former home of Occultist Aleister Crowley (which was in fact later bought by Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, at the time himself an ardent admirer of the self-styled “Great Beast”), but funds were lacking. Instead William Burroughs created a ‘virtual’ academy: first in the pages of Mayfair, then in the various articles for the Underground Press, and books like The Job and The Wild Boys. In a letter of 17^th October 1968, he tells Brion Gysin: “Have finished the book of essays and interviews entitled Academy 23...” and although it would not in fact come out under that name, in its final published form as The Job the book of interviews with Daniel Odier, augmented with auxiliary texts, would include a long section entitled Academy 23. (As can be seen in the recent Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974, this desire to create some sort of ‘handbook’ would feed not only into the likes of The Job and The Revised Boy Scout Manual but also, ultimately, The Third Mind.)

Fast forward to the late 1970s, and another young man who had made contact with Burroughs during his London years, performance artist and “wrecker of civilization” Genesis P-Orridge, was also thinking of an academy... a FINAL academy. The Wild Boys re-envisioned via ‘Industrial Music’ as “psychick youth” - with a Temple all of their own. Uncle Bill and Gen had struck up a friendship of sorts in London in the early 70s, and through Burroughs Gen had also met Brion Gysin and Terry Wilson, who attended early Throbbing Gristle concerts such as the ICA launch and the show at the Nag’s Head. TG were profoundly inspired by Burroughs & Gysin and the idea of the Cut-Ups, particularly in relation to sound and the infamous tape-recorder experiments. TG co-founder, Peter ‘Sleazy’ Christopherson, had experimented with found-sound and location recordings, building equipment to manipulate tape playback long before the modern sampling revolution. He had also bonded with Burroughs when he visited him at The Bunker to show him some of his photographic work featuring young male models that Burroughs was very taken with. TG’s sidekick Monte Cazazza recorded a rendition of Brion Gysin’s permutation poem ‘Kick That Habit Man’ for their label, and many of the key ‘Industrial’ bands cited Burroughs & Gysin as primary influences. Later, when Antony Balch died P-Orridge was instrumental in saving the original film-reels of his work, and TG’s Industrial Records would release the first ever LP of the Cut-Up tape experiments, ‘Nothing Here Now But The Recordings’.

What follows is based on my actual Notes made at the time, previously unpublished. There has been some attempt at reconstruction – mostly with regard to the sets of William & Brion, who performed on all four nights – but otherwise this is as close as possible to my actual impressions & observations of 30 years ago (with the addition of occasional ‘editorial’ hindsight!) Word pictures of a moment in time . . .

THE FINAL ACADEMY:

LONDON/MANCHESTER/LIVERPOOL/LONDON

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 1982

‘THE FINAL ACADEMY is not a homage but a development towards the future...’

- From the original press-release

“The Final Academy is an apocalyptic term. It is the place where knowledge and anti-knowledge are going to war.”

– Genesis P-Orridge interviewed by Chris Bohn, NME, 25^th September 1982

‘William Burroughs and Brion Gysin are two explorers of these New Lands [(that) little explored sit upon our shoulders] Both have shown courage in revealing their private thoughts, feelings, ideas and fantasies... Both have revealed the control mechanisms of those in power and seek to disarm them. But theirs is not a nihilistic gesture. They offer a future, a body of information that is beautiful, funny, and frightening and which points to the making of a New World.’

– Roger Ely, Statements Of A Kind

Organised by David Dawson, Roger Ely, and Genesis P-Orridge, The Final Academy consisted of a series of main events over four days @ The Ritzy Cinema, Brixton: 29^th September to 2^nd October, 1982. William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin would be celebrated in film, music, performance and readings. The famous experimental films shot by Antony Balch in the 1960s would be shown each night. There would also be performances by the experimental music groups that had been inspired by their example: 23 Skidoo, Last Few Days, Cabaret Voltaire and the debut of Psychic TV (recently formed from the ashes of Throbbing Gristle), as well as a variety of other poets and performance artists. Some, like John Giorno & Terry Wilson, were of course friends with Burroughs & Gysin; others, like Anne Bean, Paul Burwell & Ruth Adams, were associates of Roger Ely from the B2 Gallery.

An exhibition of Brion Gysin paintings, complete with Dreamachine, collages from The Third Mind, and scrapbook material ran concurrently at the B2 Gallery, Wapping. There was also a book-signing @ Compendium Books in Camden Town, William supported by Victor Bockris: A William Burroughs Reader, Cities of the Red Night and A Report From The Bunker: With William Burroughs all hot off the presses – and Here To Go: Planet R101 by Brion Gysin & Terry Wilson and the Burroughs/Gysin/TG special, both from RE/Search.

There were also ‘Regional Events’: Burroughs, Giorno, & Psychic TV @ The Haçienda, Manchester on October 4^th; Burroughs, Giorno & Jeff Nuttall @ The Centre Hotel, Liverpool on October 5^th; and a one-off @ Heaven, Charing Cross on October 7^th, billed as: William S. Burroughs, John Giorno, Marc Almond, Heathcote Williams + Derek Jarman, Psychic TV, Last Few Days, Cerith Wyn Evans.

I had made contact with Throbbing Gristle as a 14 year-old-schoolboy fan, already very much into William Burroughs. It seemed like no sooner had I met them than TG split, and over the next year or so Gen & Sleazy’s half evolved into ‘Psychic Television Limited’, with its attendant Conceptual Art gag masquerading as Fan-Club pretending to be a Cult, ‘Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth’ (sic). I was close friends with Geff Rushton (later ‘John Balance’ of Coil), only a couple of years my senior when he got together with Sleazy. Through my friendship with them I found myself for a while part of a circle that revolved around the ideas of Aleister Crowley and Austin Osman Spare: all Astral Projection, Dream Control, Sex-Magick and Sigils. Equally, the life & work of Burroughs & Gysin – with their Cut-Ups, Dreamachine, Playback, and Third Mind – offered a toolkit for similar ends.

“Dear Mom and Dad: I am going to join The Wild Boys. When you read this I will be far away...”

End of September, 1982: barely a month shy of my 16^th birthday, and for my sins I am a “Psychick Youth” - aspirant and unrepentant. The PTV entourage duly went to meet with The Old Man upon his arrival in the UK, and would be a kind of ‘honour-guard’ to William & Brion for the duration of their visits. Derek Jarman documented it all with his trademark Super 8 camera. Klaus Maeck filmed footage of Burroughs for the ‘Dream Sequence’ in Decoder. Sleazy helped set it all up, and can be seen - along with Burroughs & Grauerholz arriving by black cab - in Jarman’s Pirate Tape: a home movie of the filming in a used hi-fi & TV-repair shop behind Tottenham Court Road. Derek Jarman’s former boyfriend Howard Brookner was following the action with a camera, making his documentary Burroughs: The Movie - in much the same way that Victor Bockris had been Court Recorder at The Bunker, making With William Burroughs.

Thanks to Genesis P-Orridge I have a ringside seat when William S. Burroughs arrives. Everybody wants to get their books signed, or have their photo taken with him. I choose to do neither, deliberately. As well as the PTV connection, I have corresponded with J. G. Ballard, Eric Mottram, Jeff Nuttall, and Bill’s old pal, Alex Trocchi; I am also a skinny, pale, intense, bookish young boy. I’m sure none of any of these details hurt. Eventually I am in just the right place at just the right time...

When I get a chance to speak to William in person, because of my interests at that time and the seeming preoccupations of many of those taking part in The Final Academy events, I ask him about Magic and whether he would care to recommend any books on the subject? Without hesitation he mentions Dion Fortune’s Psychic Self-Defense, even though he qualifies it as “a bit old-fashioned.” Then, without prompting on my part, he begins to talk of Black Magic and Curses in Morocco, travelling with Medicine Men up the Amazon, and Astral Projection and Dream Control. I realise that for Burroughs all this is UTTERLY REAL, the “Magical Universe” in fact. He tells me about a dream he had as a young man, working as an exterminator in Chicago: of watching from a helpless Out-of-Body point of view floating above the bed as his body got up and went out with some unknown and sinister purpose that he was powerless to influence. With a shudder, he tells me that possession is “still the basic fear.”

He asks if I would like to “get some air” and we take a walk round the block. To break the ice, I talk about books: he is delighted to discover that I have read his beloved Denton Welch, also J. W. Dunne’s An Experiment With Time. I have found them in my old school library, and know both have been a tremendous influence on him in different ways. Knowing of his interest I also mention that I have just read Colin Wilson’s The Quest For Wilhelm Reich, published the year before. He likes Wilson, he says, jokes that “the Colonel” with his cottage in Wales in Wilson’s Return of the Lloigor and his own Colonel Sutton-Smith from The Discipline of DE are one and the same.  On something of a roll, I mention Real Magic by Isaac Bonewits, and he acknowledges that it has “some good information” – but is much more enthusiastic about Magic: An Occult Primer by David Conway [years later I would discover that Burroughs & Conway had in fact exchanged letters on various subjects pertaining to magic, occultism, and psychic phenomena – but that is decidedly another story!]

He talks about different kinds of perception, and I hear for the first time his famous remark that the purpose of all Art & Writing is “to make people aware of what they know but don’t know that they know!” He describes the ‘Walk Exercise’, in which you try to see everybody on the street before they see you - “I was taught this by an old Mafia don in Chicago… sharpens your ‘Survival IQ’…  It pays to keep your eyes and ears open” - as well as an on-the-spot illustration of the theory of Cut-Ups as Consciousness Expansion:

“As soon as you walk down the street like this – or look out the window, turn a page, turn on the TV – your awareness is being Cut: the sign in that shop window, that car passing by, the sound of the radio… Life IS a Cut-Up…”

I ask him about Cut-Ups with tape-recorders, a hot topic at The Final Academy. Telling me about his experiments with ‘Playback’ (where recordings are made, cut-up, then played back on location, often accompanied by the taking of photos) he actually describes it to me with a chuckle as “Sorcery!”

The impact of the Cut-Ups is very much in evidence at The Final Academy, you could almost say that it is the one thing that unites all the performers – certainly where the bands are concerned. In his essay The Academy (The Virus Spreads) – which is included in The Final Academy’s lavish program, Statements of a Kind - David Darby writes:

“Terry Wilson has described Cut Up as a form of ‘exorcism’. Burroughs says it is like table tapping; you can use it to read into the future, to see what is about to happen and thereby control it. A variety of today’s music reminds me of this ‘disembodiment’. Holger Czukay, the German musician and psychic believer who edits music... inserting snatches of ghostly voices taken off shortwave radio and TV. The LP My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne – title taken from the novel by Amos Tutuola, spiritualist and medium – with its mixture of Islamic chant and Black American radio exorcism and evangelism dubbed over strange rhythmic instrumentals... New York’s Grandmaster Flash, who cuts in snatches of other records... Then, of course, there’s Cabaret Voltaire, Clock DVA, 23 Skidoo, Psychic Television, all of whom have declared... a desire now to create a new music with video and taped voices, to redefine music as a percussive soundtrack almost, a muttered trance as much as a dance in which real and imaginary visions are seen...”

Brion Gysin I only met very fleetingly, I was just another boy in a roomful of boys, the youngest and at that stage still something of a star-struck fan. I DO remember his response to our ‘psychick youth’ honour-guard, though: “Gen, I don’t know how you’ve done this, but I’ve never had so many pretty boys being so helpful all day long!” Terry Wilson was also there in his capacity as Brion’s informal secretary, friend, collaborator, and “apprentice to an apprentice” (as Gysin himself had said), and would be one of the performers on the bill as well. He was tall and thin, in a crumpled dark blue suit, pale face “fading away behind a fringe of hair” [as Felicity Mason puts it in her essay for event program Statements Of A Kind] and seemed nervous, shy: on the one hand in awe of Burroughs & Gysin, on the other wary of all the shaven-headed acolytes circling around event organisers Genesis P-Orridge and Psychic TV.                                 

The opening announcement, politely requesting that there is no flash photography and that there must be no recording, seems almost surreal: I have never been to an event that is so obviously being documented for posterity – it seems as if every other person has a camera or tape-recorder of some kind, and the strange binaural recording ‘head’ that I recognise from TG’s concerts is right in front of the stage at all times. I wonder what will happen to all the material?

Each night opens to a soundtrack of tape-recordings from the Burroughs archive, the kind of cut-up experiments that were released just last year as the final album on TG’s Industrial Records label, Nothing Here Now But The Recordings. Films are shown by the late Antony Balch (Gen helped to salvage them after he died of Stomach Cancer in 1980) Bill, Brion, Ian, Mikey Portman and others (hello Alex Trocchi!) in 1960s London, New York, Paris, Tangiers “Hello – Yes, hello – look at that picture – does it seem to be persisting? Thank You!” – Scientology training exercises - Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups, Ghosts @ No.9 (or Guerrilla Conditions), William Buys A Parrot - in colour!

The coming together of three generations, “like minds who share the common ground of The Third Mind – located at the intersection point of Cut-Ups, where the future leaks through – where logic is short-circuited, deprogramming Control.” William, Brion and John Giorno the older, literary pioneers; PTV and their pals ‘n’ peers being the younger New Wave. In between a more indeterminate crowd, performance artists and poets with a background in the Arts Lab Scene and ‘Happenings’ - they perhaps are the odder fit. Anne Bean & Paul Burwell acquit themselves well enough with their take on ‘White Man’s Got A God Complex’ (The Last Poets), but the lingering smoke from their fire-crackers didn’t do Brion Gysin’s asthma any favours. I’m not even sure Ian Hinchliffe actually appeared – the stage was in darkness, some barely audible mutterings on tape: was that him? Jeff Nuttall didn’t appear at all: apparently he was supposed to be met at the airport, and when he wasn’t just got on the next plane back to Manchester [a real shame, as I had been looking forward to finally meeting up with him; when Burroughs & Giorno appear alongside Jeff Nuttall later in the week at the reading he has organised at The Centre Hotel in Liverpool, any mention of Psychic TV or The Final Academy will be conspicuous in its absence...] Roger Ely’s story The Legacy was a haunting evocation of the perils of psychic attack and fallout from ritual experiments: a woman obsessed - or even possessed - by the spirit of her dead occultist father. I liked the slides that went with it, too (Ruth Adams?) The whole thing eerie after my first-ever conversation with Mr. Burroughs covering similar territory only the day before... “Possession is still the basic fear.”

The audience is a real gathering of the tribes: art students, bookworms, college lecturers, druggies, hippy survivors, political radicals, punks and queers. Wild Boys – and Girls! – of all ages, and of course a growing number of Psychick Youth. People have come from far and wide: I meet a tres serieux French couple who want to talk about apomorphine, General Semantics (but don’t believe that I have read Korzybski!), and an earnest, grey-clad group from Yugoslavia [Laibach] who have clearly hit it off with Last Few Days & 23 Skidoo.

There are sullen mutterings about the seating, lack of a bar, complaints that the event is “too literary” - others clearly don’t understand the connections: a schoolteacher asks: “What have all these weirdo bands got to do with anything?” Anne Bean is overheard to remark “I am neither psychic nor youthful!” A drugged-up punk girl sneers “Aren’t you a bit too young for all this ‘psychick youth’ bollocks?” – oblivious to the implicit irony. Terry Wilson treads uneasily between the more literary camp and the large circle of Psychick Youth acolytes, who flank Burroughs when he’s not reading. I keep a low-profile and thus secure a ringside seat on the edge of the group. Denise from Vox complains about the level of marketing: “we were constantly being handed leaflets about Giorno Poetry Systems, or Burroughs’ new book, or PTV’s Temple T-shirts. Not nice!” – but I just see this as a clash of cultures: the English ‘well-meaning amateur’ being challenged by American professionalism, and of course Counter-Culture from the Hippies through the Punks and on has always been wary of commercialism (as if nobody has to make a living!) Simon from Sounds is clearly a convert, though: talking of Aleister Crowley, Gerald Gardner, Austin Osman Spare - wants to know how he can get a copy of the PTV videos, gives out his contact details [Simon Dwyer (1959-1997) would later create world-renowned counter-culture journal Rapid Eye, in which he would showcase the likes of Psychic TV, Gilbert+George, Derek Jarman, and Kathy Acker.]

There is a weight of anticipation, expectation, about the launch of Gen & Sleazy’s new venture, Psychic Television, but they will not actually ‘perform’ as such. David Darby’s essay in the program Statements of a Kind suggests these are groups who are fast losing interest in what they see as the outmoded concept of band-on-stage. In the NME the week before, Gen tells Chris Bohn:

“William, Brion and the poet John Giorno used writing because in their day writing was the most vital, living form for propaganda. They got hold of tape-recorders and made films with (the late) Antony Balch, always trying to reapply what they discovered through writing to other media. Now you’ve got groups like Cabaret Voltaire, 23 Skidoo, Last Few Days and Psychic TV who have followed through and used tape, cut-ups, random chats and sound in the way they’ve read or at least been inspired in Burroughs’ and Gysin’s books. They’ve put it, though, into popular culture, i.e. music, which happens at the moment to be the most vital form.”

One solution is the move towards film, slides, video - and Psychic TV would seem to be at the forefront here: if the Revolution IS going to be televised, after all, then PTV are first in line with their bid for the franchise...

As well as the films and readings, each night there is a band:

23 Skidoo, a firm favourite, start off proceedings. Their recently reduced personnel of Alex, Johnny & Fritz have moved far beyond their Post-Punk Funk origins to a new ritual ambience: the sound of bells, cymbals and gongs augmented by tape-loops and gas-cylinder percussion, “urban gamelan.” In Statements Of A Kind, the lavish program for The Final Academy, they describe themselves as “cultural assassins” who “embrace this ceremony of the constant random factor.” Like shaven headed warrior monks, they go about their almost meditative business on a darkened stage – while above them the films flicker like ghost-light...

Last Few Days are new to me, an unknown quantity, but I recognise Fritz from Skidoo, also former TG soundman Danny (‘Stan Bingo’). Cello, clarinet, megaphones, tapes. Their imagery, such as it is, is apocalyptic. ‘Apocalyptic chic’ is very much the thing at The Final Academy. “Ours is a soundtrack for a dying age.”

Cabaret Voltaire are also ‘reduced personnel’ now: down to a duo, Chris Watson has left. They have been recently ably augmented by drummer Alan Fish, but not tonight. Keyboards, movie dialogue and The Reverend Jim Jones cut-up & looped. Ambient music accompanying scratch-mix video – a barrage of cut-up visuals and deprogramming imagery, like their Doublevision release [but definitely NOT the ‘ambient music’ of Brian Eno & co.!]

Genesis P-Orridge introduces Brion Gysin, all in white: “And now, the man who makes the impossible, possible!”

Brion announces that the Cut-Ups are now about 23 years old, “the average age of my musicians, and I hope the average age of the house.” Each night there are songs (“Some old words, and some new tunes”) with music: Ramuntcho Matta (son of the Chilean Surrealist painter) on New Wave Funk guitar – I recognise Tessa from The Slits on cello, and the drummer from Rip, Rig and Panic – plus a percussionist.

There are also readings from Here To Go (“I understand you can buy it in the lobby”): No-one can give you the keys, even if you know what a key looks like (Korzybski, again!) Teaching is anything except what you expect it to be. “Turn the Boys Over is one way of doing it” – seduce the Teacher – Terry Wilson: “The knowledge is stolen?” “Knowledge is passed from a Master to a Disciple by the actual Act of Love” (the Sufi mystic and poet Rumi)

From The Process: the smoking circle, Youngest Brother speaks of “our enemy the sun” and Hassan i-Sabbah. “Mr Ugly Spirit himself disguised as a hydro-helium bomb.” There is no friendship, no love – the desert knows only allies and accomplices – “There are no brothers” Everyone is always ALONE, their adventure in life a singular one. A criminal, a magician, is an Outsider.

“Magic, like Art, is outside the Law”

And now, the moment we have all been waiting for? Psychic Television, the propaganda arm of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth (sic) – carrying on from the late TG’s ‘psychick youth rallies’(grey-clad acolytes, sporting shaven head and pigtail a la Tibetan Buddhist monks, very much in evidence)  – but “Psychic TV is not a group, we are not about entertainment”   – more a ritual in sound and visuals: a large video projection screen in the centre, TV monitors flank the stage, where Genesis P sits in near darkness, intoning a carefully prepared Statement to pre-recordings of soundtrack music, ritual ambience and holographic 3D sound effects, while Sleazy mixes the visuals. Tinkling bells and the moaning of Tibetan thighbone trumpets: the sound of souls in torment. A squeaking bicycle wheel. “Are you asleep, or do you want to wake up?” asks a pre-recorded, nasal voice. Then, amidst the swirl of lush strings, ‘A Message From The Temple.’ Meanwhile, the visuals: symbols of Control – “sex, power and magick” – I am amused to see that it’s clearly more than a lot of the hard-core Punks can take. The atmosphere is almost religious, for all that the images on screen are transgressive: bloodletting, genital piercing, initiation rites – something sexual, even if it isn’t clear exactly what. Glancing across to where William Burroughs sits, flanked by the Psychick Youth faithful, he seems captivated.

Speaking of the éminence grise, the Old Man of this particular Alamut: when Mr. Burroughs climbs onto the stage and takes his place behind the wooden desk, shuffling his papers and stretching awkwardly – like a doctor about to give a particularly unpleasant diagnosis – you could hear the proverbial pin drop. This is what everybody has come to see, to hear. At a brisk, business-like pace he starts with readings from the new book [the as-yet-unpublished Western The Place of Dead Roads] originally going to be called The Johnson Family after turn-of-the-century slang for ‘good’ bums, thieves, etc. A Johnson is a good man to do business with, honours his word – is not snoopy or judgemental – ‘Minds his Own Business’ – but also will not stand by when help is needed.

Burroughs introduces his alter-ego, Kim Carsons: a slimy, morbid youth, who adores ectoplasm, wallows in abominations – “when Kim was 15 his father allowed him to withdraw from the school because he was so unhappy there and so much disliked by the other boys and their parents” – He decides to go out West and become a Shootist “If anyone doesn’t like the way Kim looks and acts and smells, he can fill his grubby peasant paw” – He gets “a progressive education”  – “young man I think you’re an assassin” “I want to be one, sir!” – and recruits a band of flamboyant and picturesque outlaws, the Wild Fruits.

There are also extracts from Cities of the Red Night, Nova Express, and old favourites like ‘Twilight’s Last Gleamings’ and ‘The Do-Rights’ – the audience are attentive, rapt, respectful even, but lines like “He asks me what the American flag means to me, and I tell him soak it in heroin, doc, and I’ll suck it!” has us laughing in all the right places. Like the seasoned pro he is, William S. Burroughs has his audience right where he wants them.

Finally: The only goal worth striving for is Immortality, in Space: “This is the Space Age, and we are Here To Go.” Amen.

A final teaching for The Final Academy . . .

‘The Western Lands is a real place. It exists, and we built it, with our hands and our brains. We paid for it with our blood and our lives. It’s ours, and we’re going to take it.’

- William S. Burroughs, from ‘Statement on the Final Academy’

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Reflects On William S. Burroughs' Sound Experiments

From http://www.thefader.com/

Exclusive: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Reflects On William S. Burroughs' Sound Experiments

By PATRICK D. MCDERMOTT

For years, Dais Records co-founder Ryan Martin has been talking with avant-garde artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge about Nothing Here Now but the Recordings, William S. Burroughs' collection of tape recorder experiments and spoken work "cut outs" from the '60s and '70s. The intriguing artifact was originally compiled in 1981 by P-Orridge's label Industrial Records (it was actually the label's final release) and hasn't been pressed to vinyl since. Now, with the help of P-Orridge and Burroughs' estate, Dais Records are dusting off the long out-of-print project and giving it a proper vinyl re-issue.

In this new video interview—produced by Martin and Louis Caldarola and debuting here on FADER—P-Orridge provides behind-the-scenes stories of how Nothing came together in the first place, recounting hitchhiking to London to meet Burroughs' for the first time and helping him catalog shoeboxes stuffed with unlabeled cassette tapes and bits of stray reel-to-reel. "Genesis agreed to sit down with us and record recollections and thoughts about the original album and its lasting effect on modern culture," Martin told FADER of the 8-minute video's conception. "The video that came as a result seamlessly pulls together many different movements and concepts that are hardwired into our modern day conceptual beings, all of which were being discovered by Burroughs on these recordings." The reissue is out in January 2015 but you can pre-order it now; check out the record's artwork and track-listing below.

Track list:

Side A
1. Captain Clark Welcomes You Aboard
2. The Saints Go Marching Through All The Popular Tunes 
3. Summer Will 
4. Outside The Pier Prowed Like Electric Turtles
5. The Total Taste Is Here – News Cut-Up
6. Choral Section, Backwards
7. We See The Future Through The Binoculars Of The People 
8. Just Checking Your Summer Recordings

Side B 
9. Creepy Letter – Cut-Up At The Beat Hotel In Paris 
10. Inching – "Is This Machine Recording?" 
11. Handkerchief Masks – News Cut-Up 
12. Word Falling – Photo Falling 
13. Throat Microphone Experiment 
14. It's About Time To Identify Oven Area 
15. Last Words of Hassan Sabbah

Cults in our midst by Eileen Barker TOPY article

Temple of Psychic Youth "Cult" Article from the book Cults in our midst by Eileen Barker. Date Unknown. Contributed by https://twitter.com/simonjgray

Genisis Breyer & Lady Jay recieve PANDROGYNE triptych POORtraits from artist Steven Leyba

n 2006 Genisis and LKady Jaye are given the triptych POORtraits of the Pandrogyne. The first official portraits of the pandrogyne project which was Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and Lady Breyer P-Orridge. This is much of the footage shot for but not used in my movie "WHAT IS ART?"

PLAY[the emerge of] ASPECTS OF THE WORK OF GENESIS P-ORRIDGE by JULIE WILSON The Irrational Third

This article is a condensed extract from my research into the psychological basis of the work of Genesis P-Orridge. As such the article will only touch upon a few important areas of his work, and will present a number of theories and ideas which represent possible interpretations. I take my starting point from the strong sense of the child" present in some aspects of the work of Genesis P-Orridge. In this article I will expand the idea of the child", and will explore its empirical qualities as states of play, creativity, irrationality, chaos, crisis, and archetypical personifications.

The child is a double edged sword. First, it is the 'Irrational Third' which embraces instinct, and maintains a deep connection with a sense of 'otherness'. It is the Games Master, embedded in the psyche, a tool capable of navigating and functioning within the unstable landscape of the unconscious. Secondly, it is a sinister agent capable of unmasking the adult world of politics, economics and shame, as fraud, sham, and illusion. Association with the child is like having tea with a murderer, the possibility of death is present in every transaction. Such a character is attractive because he has ventured into the marginal world of unsanctioned behaviour, and into the universe of primal desires. Such a character has designed it's own autonomous constructions of meaning, and it's own reality which exists outside of the controlled state-run realities offered by society. Such a character offers us an attractive glimpse of freedom, and a feeling of exhilaration aroused by the duel sensations of fear, coupled with the inertia of possibilities. We can call this character by the various names associated with the child archetype as definded by Jung, such as Hero, Christ, Victim, Trickster, or we can simply associate the child with the archetypal experiences of the various levels and states which might equally be termed creative impulses. The child is, in it's most recognisable form, the Artist, Mystic, and Shaman. Such characters used the skills and technologies available to them in their given age as tools for evocation, provocation and seduction. Genesis P-Orridge is no different; he has embraced current trends, philosophies, ideologies, and technologies, procuring them and synthesizing them through systems of assembly and disassembly - creative play - forming them into his own esoteric, devotional language. Genesis plays with words, ideas and objects not with the cool headed intellectualism of the adult, but with the instinctive, emotional and intuitive nature of a child. Thus, the sensual, semi-unconscious language of symbols, sounds, images, and words is by nature often conflicting, accidental, ironic, sinister, and often poignant.

Consumed by the instinctive state of play, the hand of an artist makes automatic random gestures, choices, and manipulations which are nonlinear. Jung has suggested that the active nature of the child 'compensate or correct, in a meaningful manner, the inevitableone-sidednesses and extravagances of the conscious mind' which attempts to dominate the personality with logic and rationalism. 

Jung has suggested that the child archetype is a symbol of emerging independence and individuality. The child therefore exists in a state of incompleteness within a realm of chaos and crisis. Baudrillard has suggested that the principle of the child is 'Other' to the adult. He describes the nature if this 'Otherness' as 'total seduction', suggesting that while the adult relies on it's own belief that it is an adult, children do not 'believe' or intellectualise (that they are children), they just are children: They are, as it were, a different species, and their vitality and development announces the eventual destruction of the superior -adult- world that surrounds them. Childhood haunts the adult universe as a subtle and deadly presence.

Such a state described by Genesis P-Orridge can be likened to the episodes of archaic ecstasy which have been well documented by anthropologists such as Eliade. Within a Postmodern setting, such states transpose almost too easily into the emerging ideas concerning the alternative ecstasies possible within the realm of Virtual Reality and Cyberspace.

Genesis P-Orridge uses all the tools to hand, mixing philosophies both ancient and contemporary, arts practice, popular icons and ritual within a game of possibilities. The playing of the game has for Genesis become a devotional activity; as Jung suggests the 'irrational third' the child/ play/ creative impulse/artist, is not only a psychological phenomena pertaining to the chatotic anarchic aspect of the personality, but can also become a philosophy for living which offers an alternative Game Play and a virtual Hypertext body, requiring 'religious repetition and renewal by ritual', since it is the vehicle of emergence. A process through which -one 'becomes'- an idea becomes material, and an ideology becomes concrete.

In interviews with Genesis P-Orridge, one of the recurring themes is concerned with his own childhood practice of creating and retreating into spaces, bunkers, going underground, and descending into the dark. In the proximity of body and earth, Genesis suggests that for him, there was no distinction between life and death. This is the point at which 'Bodies, and manifestations and thoughts are irrelevant'. The suggestion here is that such circumstances have assumed initiatory, seminal significance. Such experiences are in keeping with those commonly associated with 'marginals', Shamans, medicine-men, mystics, etc. Within the context of myth and ritual practice, such behaviour typifies the joourney of the 'ephebe'/initiate who is stripped of status and identity and thrust into a world of chaos and contrary values. 'Marginal situations' are those which tend to remove the individual temporarly from his or her normal social existence, allowing a person the opportunity to 'indulge in excesses in their own way'. During primitive initiatory rituals the period of marginality is often conjoined with a 'period of licence', when the ephebe is encouraged to indulge in behaviour which is not normally sanctioned by the tribe or the society in which the rite takes place. All such marginal behaviour reflects some opposition to normal social features. Oppositional experiences might include the explorations of the sensations of near death, the exercising of strong desires (of the Will) both practically and through the development of magical practices, the exploration of personal alternative sexuality, and the practice of deep introspection on a par with techniques of archaic 'ecstasy'. The empirical nature(s) of the child/artist and of play and the creative impulses, seem inextricably suited to these marginal regions which also exist within the realms of chaos and crisis. The theme of chaos and crisis created by oppositional principals finds a common resonance within Jung's discourse concerning the collision of the conscious and the unconscious: '...out of the collison of opposites the unconscious psyche always creates a third thing of an irrational nature, which the conscious mind neither expects nor understands. It presents itself in a form that is neither a straight yes" nor a straight no", and is consequently rejected by both. For the conscious mind knows nothing beyond the opposites and, as a result, has no knowledge of the thing that unites them. Since, however, the solution of the conflict through the union of opposites is of vital importance, and is moreover the very thing that the conciuos mind is longing for, some inkling of the creative act, and the significance of it, nevertheless get through'. 

Here Jung draws attention to the creative impulse which is stimulated by chaos, crisis and the collision of opposites. Within this kind of creative atmosphere, the concept of death is ever present since the license of possibilities offered to the ephebe is also a sea in which he or she could drown. Baudrillard has termed such a sensation 'Exoticism': 'Exoticism is the acute and immidiate perception of an eternal incomprehensibility'. 

This idea is echoed in the work of Genesis P-Orridge who frames his reponse within the altogether more positive view, suggesting that 'play' within such a sea of, what Baudrillard has termed 'incomprehensibility', and what Genesis terms 'possibility' is a purpose in itself: ' Since there is no goal to this experiment other than the goal of perpetually discovering new forms and new ways of perceiving, it is an infinte game. An infinite game is played for the purpose of continuing play, as opposed to a finite game which is played for the purpose of winning or defining winners. It is an act of free will. No one can 'play' who is forced to play. Play is, indeed, implicitly voluntary'.

Genesis uses incidental, as well as self generated crisis, to evoke, stimulate and manipulate creative impulses, and autonomous states of mind. He also allows himself to be used by other people: '...you allow everyone else to come through you, and transmit through you all the anger, and confusion that they have felt since they were born. And that's the job of the artist, whatever medium they use; to be a vessel and a vehicle for the mind, the dreams, the unconcious mind of the people who are confronted with their art'.

The celebration of distress, hurt, anger, through art is likened by Genesis to an 'exorcism and an expression of the neuroses, the fear and the liberation of a tribe' The 'artist' (creative agent) Genesis takes on the role as 'vehicle', and of 'vessel' through which to channel the hurt of the 'tribe' as one fulfilling a responsibility for the well being of that tribe. The creative impulse towards 'being' the artist 'vessel' is perhaps, in itself a vehicle through which to channel some of his own personal distress. In this way, the artist takes on the archetype roles of Martyr, Hero/Warrior, Christ figure, playing out the possibilities inherent in each of these possessions. Consumed by these personified creative state, the field of perceptual possibilities is forced to broaden. The creative gaze of the artist turns from parents, to school, to institution, to government, to humanity. With each transference, he uses actual instances of injustice and hurt in his own life to identify the 'similarities' and type of control used by larger regimes. So the child becomes a victim frustrated by the mechanisms of enforced control which dictate it's existence. Through confrontation, and absorption into such situations, the artist is forced into martyrdom, acts of terrorism and spiritual scrutiny. Genesis forces himself into dangerous physical and psychological areas where the act of survival becomes creative. Such situations are experienced and supported within the complex framework of private rituals, which serve to focus Genesis, both physically and psychologically, on a given purpose, idea or path of exploration.

Experiences within altered state of consciousness can be likened to the childhood practice of creating separate, marginal 'spaces'. Experiences within such 'spaces' or altered states of consciousness, are never fully articulated, but are manipulated by Genesis into images, symbols, fragments of sound, and words. Such images and symbols are only 'responses' which present themselves to the concious mind - they are possibilities, not solutions. Genesis allows fragments of information to break through into the conscious, making a positive decision not to attempt to define, or fully describe their meanings. Such information is manipulated into the everyday situation, and into popular culture, which again can be associated with the preoccupation of creating spaces, in this sense, imaginative/sensual spaces. Genesis P-Orridge is pro-active in the development and exploration of personal disciplines and mechanisms for the purposes of holding back logical rationalism which might block access to creative states of altered perception. The personal battle is then to maintain such altered states on a semi-sensual/ experimental level, almost on a full-time basis. In this way Genesis P-Orridge moves beyond passive, intellectual descriptions of the principals of political, economic, psychological control, and places his physical, emotional, and psychological self in the path of destruction. By doing so, he is able to formulate theories, models and manifestos which not only embody the innate possibilities of practical responses, but also highlight the level of sensual connectedness which ties the politics of the internal self to the strategies of external systems of control. Evidence of this kind of association between personal and social politics, can be seen in 'Giftgas' which moves from 'a children's story' to 'a medical casebook' into a manifesto and 'political theory'. Culture is viewed as the battleground, or playing field, onto which theories, models, amnd manifestos are thrown. The emphasis in writings such as 'Giftgas' shifts from pain to pleasure, as the notions of fear and guilt, desire and freedom, are constantly replayed, generating quantities of variations on a theme, 'possibilities', and posed questions, which remain attractively open ended. These are TRANSMISSIONS -'projected areas of learning', which are intellectually interactive. They contribute to the 'live ammunition' which is littered about the battlefield of culture. The battle for the 'self' is, and should be, NOTHING SHORT OV A TOTAL WAR. The idea is projected not the solution.
'The Basic premise in all my work has always been, if I think about something and it seems to make sense, to project it into the public arena of popular culture. To see wether it survives or not in it's own right, to see what happens and what is confirmed and denied and what creates interesting interactions and confrontations. To use popular culture as the alchemical jar and see what happens. Why I have to do that, I don't know. It's just been a drive for so long'.

Despite their dominant silhouette, these 'spaces' are devotional, they are 'cathedrals' of possibility, the words and the images enacted within these spaces set off cascades of effects which, when viewed on mass, grow into labyrinthian, chaotic constructions not unlike the areas within the psyche from which they came.

'What we need to do now is build, for our own protection and survival, we need to build speculative maps for peaople to make some kind of sense out of what appears to be random'.

A Postmodern view of culture would be that Culture is merely a collecting point for 'information', a battleground of possibilities. The projections of notional, or possible 'selves' are 'breathed' in and out of culture. Culture provides a database of possibilities, and the process of breathing information in and out, is the physical mechanism which assists personal development.

VIRTUAL MIRRORS austin osman spare essay 1995

VIRTUAL
MIRRORS
THEE PROPHETIC PORTALS OV AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE
IN SOLID T.I.M.E

"Since all phenomena (or phenomenally appearing things) which arise present no reality in themselves, they are said to be of the noumena (in other words, they are of the Voidness, regarded as the noumenal background or Source of the physical universe of the phenomena). Though not formed into anything, yet they give shape to everything. Thus it is that phenomena and noumena are ever in union, and said to be of one nature. They are, like ice and water, reflection and mirror, two aspects of a single thing."The Seven Books of Wisdom - Tibetan text. In the case of a mirror, there is a third aspect, the subject/viewer. Mirrors reveal and conceal. Their mystery permanent, their hints at doorways, windows, points of entry, and thresholds just out of reach of our conscious minds. T.I.M.E. The Imaginary Mass Emits. Image. Idea. There can be no separation, scientifically or subjectively. The atavistic face gazes down into a crystal pool. Ice-cold water. Grunts. A hand shatters the image, fear gaunt and haunting passes across, a shadowy cloud, and through all T.I.M.E. that momeant can persist, be reclaimed. "What is Time, but a variety of one thing?" Austin Osman Spare. These momeants of T.I.M.E. accumulate, are listed under memory in our modern synapses, are posited as all ways retrievable, amorphous. Nothing is forgotten, all is permitted. In a stinking cave, muttering babies scream and scratch, furs undulate in copulation. In one corner, bright-eyed first marks are daubed on a wall. They are marks to function, marks of place, of T.I.M.E. They are marks to draw results and persist beyond one human lifetime. Instinct has arisen, snake-like, coiling it's SELF into intuition and suggested the very power of suggestion. No-one noted down from a book this PROCESS, it grew from watching the elements, closeness to life-sources, death-forces that modern persons are divorced from. On this damp stone there is a curve, it is land, horizon, ejaculation, movement. "Magick consists in seeing and willing beyond the next horizon." The Sar. Mrs. Patterson stares down. Pencilled into existence. It is her as she WAS when she took Austin Osman Spare at 14 years old and initiated him into the art of sexual magick and a power-full system of sorcery (a primal oral tradition preserved through female bloodlines) that she had rediscovered and regenerated through her covert communion across T.I.M.E. with systems and techniques that grew from a most animalistic and pure union of instinct and inherited DNA encryptions. This woman knew, and she taught Spare, how to travel through T.I.M.E., and just how malleable and manipulable a form of energy and matter I.T. was. ( where I.T. = Imaginary Time). She also instructed Spare in techniques that could empower him to remain Present in L-if-E, after an apparent physical death. She was a medium, but her guides were not the "New Age" romantic, and patronising ikons of native peoples and tribes. Not just Indian Chiefs, Pharoahs, Tibetan Rinpoches or aborigines. They were more like the creatures of Clive Barkers "Hellraiser" visions, or the demons in "Evil Dead". They were the deepest, most atavistic and raw representations of the alien that we can experience. Equivalent, if you will, to a seriously hard-core DMT entity confrontation. Mrs. Paterson understood a most particular secret. Her medium was her SELF. She was quite able to travel through mirrors and throughout T.I.M.E. "Look at me, my face: do you not detect a close resemblance, it is hardly surprising - I look like everybody. You will learn why later. Say it aloud then, or are you afraid now: that I resemble you, that I am your living image. You are standing before a mirror." Lord Patchogue. There is a drawing in my possession by Spare, a pencil and gouache, finished in 1928. The main figure is Mrs. Paterson. Coming from behind her head, making a blister in a shimmering green pencilled aura, is a half completed face. It belongs to no-one, everyone. It is her at times, it is cavalier, it is also Austin Osman Spare. This one picture contains all the secrets Spare never wrote down, and his books are thorough, precise, and often opaque. Spare appears in the bottom right-hand corner, represented as he projects he will look as an old man, eyes closed, concentrated, manifesting, it would seem, the other beings in the picture. Remarkably, his projection of an older SELF is uncannily accurate. "he interest alone was valid, at least, who can find his path without recourse to the senses. The five illegitimate senses. By "interest" should be understood the stake, the promise of some comfort, a pleasure, a discovery." Jaques Rigaut. What Spare is doing is "tricking" us. All his writings are symbolic, they were never intended to be taken literally, as illustrations, on any level. His writings are primarily journals, decorative encryptions of basic techniques of travel. But they are appendices to the REAL work. This special trick was to convince everybody that his drawings, paintings, and images were symbolic, fantastical, products of his imagination. They are in fact the essence of his sorcery. Like all great sorcerers, he hid his central secret in apparently commonplace medium. What we discover in this key picture is that he is actually kneeling. It is actually a "photographic" record of his prediction of both his own bodily death, and his worship of Mrs. Paterson as the keeper of immortality.  "Lord Patchogue dashes to the mirror to assure himself that he is still there, not really he himself, but his nose, the nose that he saw only a few minutes ago. It is not so much his existence he doubts as that of each of his attributes, and if not of their existence then of their legitimacy." Lord Patchogue. Spare made consistent use, for very specifically sex magickal reasons, of late middle-aged prostitutes who would normally be considered "brash" and heavily made-up. Women who could, in his mind, represent Mrs. Paterson at the age she seduced and instructed him, and thus charge more powerfully his sexual magick rituals and Sigils as a result. Just as the sorcerer repeats elements of ritual over and over again, and uses the same magickal tools, incenses, incantations and so on repeatedly to achieve a cumulative effect, so Spare recreated a virtual sorceress to revisit, the precise intersections of T.I.M.E. and Space that she had imprinted in his brain. Through this reputedly sordid, but actually visionary method of sexual magick was able to return at Will to a potent portal, an access point into the matter of T.I.M.E. itself, and then, even deeper, into what we can only call Timelessness, though outside T.I.M.E. might be a more accurate way to articulate the state. These women were close enough to Mrs. Paterson in cosmetic physical appearance and characteristics to be used as a focussing visual key enabling him to be accelerated at the momeant of orgasm, just like a particle accelerator, into direct, inter-dimensional contact with her, and the infinite previous hers that had ever existed. This is more easily understood contemporaneously, now, in a post-DMT experiential environment. In other words, DMT would be a very good equivalent experience of what this catapulting might feel like. However Spare could recreate this at Will, and via WILL TO... over and over agen, with deep lucidity and in a state of sexual intoxication, rather than biochemical intoxication. A drug free splitting of the atoms of T.I.M.E.! "Lord Patchogue stands up. He studies his full-length portrait in the mirror. Five senses are not sufficient for his chance companions; once more they shall miss the show; they are no more ready to perceive the presence of mystery than they think of death." Jaques Rigaut. When Mrs. Paterson died, he was able to take a particular aspect of her lifesource and literally preserve I.T., still "living" into this, and one or two other, pictures. This is not to be misunderstood as in anyway vampiric. That is not what we're dealing with here. This is a much more deeply fundamental sorcery. Spare is consensually keeping open a portal of connection between the primal interdimensional knowledge and entity that was represented by the physical manifestation within linear T.I.M.E. by Mrs. Paterson's existence on this particular earth, at a partiocular alloted momeant. In the same mysterious way that, if you Will, a mirror can contain all that it faces in what seems an equally "real" world, so Spare's pictures can hold the entirety of the images and entities that he represents in them. They are THERE. The frame is exactly intended to be experienced as, and function as, the edges of a mirror. Although, becuase it is a plastic, more fixed medium, we often cannot see around the inside edges by moving, as we can with a mirror. As we cannot all ways change the amount, and depth of what we see simply by moving, as we can with a mirror. Do not be fooled by mundane physics. There are specific periods when, remarkably, the opposite is true, and these images do indeed become exactly the same as mirrors, representing an entire portal into a parallel omniverse. Further, I would suggest, indeed insist, based upon my own personal experiences, and those of many other colleagues who have acted as controls, and/or guinea pigs in my experiements with these pictures to act as confirmation, or dismissal of the actuality, that these pictures do not just become virtual mirrors. They become living portals that animate, through which entities can travel, accessing our "world" and bidding us into theirs. " I only murder that I may return." Mary Bell - Child Murderess aged 7. In the picture, when Mrs. Paterson died, he fixed her in this picture. We see him. He sinks INTO her chest, is absorbed, they rise together, androgenous, genderless both their faces, and all their ages superimposed to create one alien being. One inter-dimensional entity. He has drawn himself dying, conjuring himself into this picture in advance of that event, so that he may all ways return. Like the Cocteau character crossing back and forth through the mirror.  "Art can contradict Science." Austin Osman Spare. "Art is the truth we have realised of our belief" Austin Osman Spare. "Do you see those flowers growing on the sides of the abyss whose beauty is so deadly and whose scent is so disturbing? Beware..." de Guatia. In these sorcerous images, these his purest incantations through Art, Spare uses a graphic skill and technique second to none. Yet his most commonly seen works can appear deliberately fast and loose. The nearest modern parallel would be Salvador Dali, who could suggest perfection and hypereality in a few precisely placed marks and intersections, and through his works worship HIS own personal sorceress Gala. Dali's photoreal technique is accurate in an unearthly way too, and Dali uses delerium and dislocation of the senses to catapult himself, and us, through the parameters of madness and obsession into his personal landscape and environment. Dali occasionally masturbated into his paints, particularly painting the leather strap across Hitler's back, and made good use of the canvass as a virtual mirror viewed from one static position. I would argue that Dali, despite his genius, was a naive, struggling to describe glimpses and fragments of vision, with an ad hoc quasi-magickal perception and aspiration. Dali did not build, though he hungered too, a system as unique, primal, timeless, and fully administered by informed, cumulative, and inter-dimensional arcane knowledge as Spare. Spare KNEW all too well what he was doing, conjuring, and building. A method of physical, and neurological immortality, a means to step outside T.I.M.E. Dali really wanted too, but remained finally, restrained by his inability to travel beyond use of his imagination. For Dali, the mirror was a solid barrier into which he could gaze, but not travel. Spare was the very material of the mirror, the destroyer of it's boundaries, or limitations, and finally usurped every definition or mirrorness creating a virtual portal that accessed all momeants of T.I.M.E. past, present, future, none, in every possible and impossible infinite combination. T.I.M.E. is you see a solid, through which all passes, all is seen from a vantage point. As we lear to move our point of perception, so we act like a lens, or a mirror's surface viewed from above. Light, thought, life, passes through us, expanding outwards. We can place our mirrors anywhere, perceive them from any direction. Thus we are potentially everywhere, in every possible T.I.M.E. and every possible dimension. All travel is possible. We are an amorphous infinite density of matter. The matter is T.I.M.E. I.T. is all a matter of T.I.M.E. T.I.M.E. is malleable and thus both the portal and the means of travel. We can leave, we can return, we can cease to exist. This is the "virtual mirror" of Spare. These are the prophetic portals. But they do not prophecy Art. They prophecy an end to materiality. A disinegration, a dissipation of our corporeality beyond anything so far confessed in the small wooden box of physics. "The future is in the past, but it is not wholly contained in the present." Hoene-Wronski. Brion Gysin was another such artist of the future, another such alchemist and sorcerer who used Art to create T.I.M.E. and inter-dimensional travel. He used a different style. More abstract, more directly concerned with encryption, coding and decoding, and with a clear appreciation of post-linguistic magick. "Rub Out The Word" he would emphasis. He too was absolutely aware of the implication of his experiements and their functions. Both Gysin and Burroughs accepted as a given that the central power of their works was to trick T.I.M.E. and through another system of cumulative effect, manipulate and navigate mortality and all sources of pre-recorded L-if-E; brain; entity; location and the process of control that locks us out of this inviolate humane right to transcend physicality. Gysin was a practising magickian first and actually described at length to me in Paris his long T.I.M.E. practice of mirror staring, and the incredible melting of consensus reality that resulted for both him, and many others of the Beats. He suggested that there are "hot spots" in cultural engineering, and vehicles of convenience that accelerate the inevitable for those reckless and/or courageous enough to risk all for a possibility of disincarnation, of leaving behind the host physical body forever in a necessary transmutation into otherness, alien being, that must be the only valid goal of any of us if forward motion and discovery are truly our agenda. In traditional Western Occulture this letting go of all preconceptions, all expectations, all value systems, all inherited moral imprints, all concepts of SELF preservation, and all distictions is referred to as "The Abyss".  "See a cliff, jump off." Old TOPI Proverb. Both Spare and Gysin lived to pursue, and attain, new dimensions. They understood the hunger to pursue successful systems of sorcery, not knowledge. This alone made overt collaboration with magickal groups impossible. Where the need for nostalgic elitism, power implied by academic recall, and self-image measured by the length of one's bookshelf far too often camouflage mere self-agrandisemeant, and the essence of motivation is the servility of others. Gysin incorporated tape-recorders, permutations, projections, trance musics, mathematical formulae. Spare incorporated his own body, sexuality, and dimensional fluidity. Both were prophets of portals of virtuality and developments in quantum neurology that later became possible, and, as egalitarian (to a degree) access to cyberspace and other synthetic worlds expands globally, now become at the very least more likely, I would propose inevitable. The world we appreciate in a mirror. That world where as we get close, appears to be a large, and equally as "real" as this supposedly more physical consensus reality; and the world of Spare, where the frame of the image is arbitrary, where creatures, and perceptual environments are frozen in a precise cryogenic graphic. These worlds are mere precursor of the apparently limitless, and multi-dimensional possibilities heralded by the microchip. This century wills to be remembered eventually as the century during which the cut-up, the splitting of atom by relativity; of mind by psychedelic compounds and of linear thinking by cultural nihilism were the primary themes. Spilling over into social fragmentation, online alienation, and a dataglut that by its very scale, insists on acceleration of response by our brains, and a highly developed perceptual skill of instant, and arbitrary assembly "to see what is really there" as W. S. Burroughs has stated. "Lord Patchogue and his reflection slowly advance towards each other. They consider each other in silence, they come to a halt, they bow. A great dizziness seizes hold of Lord Patchogue. It was brief, easily done, and magickal: forehead first, he suddenly springs forwards. He strikes the glass, which shatters, but there is no one on the other side." Jaques Rigaut. Spare was aware that mystery and magick, in themselves, generate at the very least a morbid fascination, and reaction in humanE persons. He consciously used his books, his twisted Beardsley-esque graphics , his atavistic writings, to attract our interest after his physical death. Not for reasons of ego. I would contend that it was to reactivate his "mind" and re-animate his psyche. Sound far-fetched. Well, personal anecdote, take it or leave I.T. One of the Spare paintings that I used to own (now in the collection of Chris Stein) was called "The Ids". Every New Years Eve strange things would occur. Most noticeably, the two faces of Spare himself, that faced each other, would re-animate. Many different guests would suddenly gasp and say, did you know that the faces in that painting have "come alive". "They are arguing." None of these observers knew who Spare was, or any of his, or my own, ideas. Eventually I checked and found that Spare died on New Years Eve 1956. A medium called Madame Bruna, also, on a social visit, was shocked and disturbed by the "Mrs. Paterson" image. In fact, it was these repeated witnessings of the faces becoming real, moving, talking, changing, that led to the thoughts in this essay. In the case of the "Mrs. Paterson" picture, nobody felt anything malevolent. Just a powerful experience, of people "trapped in a mirror". "The Ids" however, was different. Something one could only think of as "bad" always happened when it animated. It got so predictable and incontrovertible that I took to putting it in a cupboard, facing the wall for a period before, and after New Years Eve each year. The last phenomenon was particularly odd. Before travelling abroad I arranged for two people to caretake my house in Brighton. I warned them, almost like in a fable like Hansel and Gretel, that they must not touch, move, or hang up the Spare painting "The Ids". Which was in the loft space of the house, facing the wall. I told them it may sound superstitious or stupid, but please trust me on this one. I guess, inevitably, they felt this as a challenge and chose to not only turn the picture facing outwards in the loft, but to spend a night staring at it and sleeping in the same space. Apparently, as they tell it, after an hour or so, the picture seemed to fill the room. Spare argued with himself, as usual. Then a new thing happened. The central face of a one woman (there were three women's faces above Spare's heads) came alive too. The picture seemed to grow into a huge mirror, filling the visual perception of one whole end of the loft. The room seemed to fill with green mist, and then holding her hand out, this woman walked out of the "painting" and came towards them.. In the inanimate painting, the heads are floating in a green field, no bodies. They have heavy make up on. Like the prostitutes Spare favoured for his psycho-sexual sorcery. Both people paniced, and ran from the loft. Locking the door behind them. From that time on, various destructive events affected the house, and them. They had let loose, in classic horror film style, an entity, that WAS malevolent, and with it's own agenda. One of the two people became alcoholic, both had mental breakdowns. By the way, Chris Stein WAS aware of this side of the paintings Astory, when he purchased it. Spare had been shrewd enough to make ALL his secrets non verbal, and non-linear. Not one explanation of these secrets is contained overtly in his writings. He was, in the best covert cultural traditions, working for his SELF alone. Only the atavistic hintings, and the "Virtual Mirror" drawings and paintings can articulate, and bear witness to, his phenomenal achievements. "The Universe is a creative PROCESS carried on by man's imagination, an operative power capable of becoming more supple, more animate." Teilhard de Chardin. What is happening in these certain key pictures? I would propose a few speculations. All ideas have an image. We are originally an heirglyphic species, before the restrictive linguistic and alphabetical systems we use now were adopted. Adopted I might add, purely for reasons of control, and the compression of both vision and potential in all of us. All the materials used to create and fix an image are material. They are formed of patterns of atoms and molecules, charged by certain energies that hold their specific clusters together in some way. Modern psychology also tends to accept that Ideas are material entities, like animals and plants. All mythological ideas, Jung suggests, are ESSENTIALLY REAL, and far older than any philosophy. They originated in primal perceptions, correspondences and experiences. The catalytic element that regenerates a reaction between entitic Ideas and a spectator and that favours parapsychological events, is the presence of an active archetype. In the specific case of Spare's virtual mirror art, this element can be anything from an obvious glyph (condensing and compressing a desire), a non-decorative aesthetic arrangement, or in the most intense "portal" works, an invisible charge of energy which somehow calls the deepest, instictual layers of the psyche into action. The archetype is a borderline phenomenon, an acausal connecting priciple, closest in explanation to deliberately controlled, SELF-conscious synchronicity. When Spare describes in certain of his texts "Self-Love" as, if you will, the engine of his sorcery, I believe he means SELF-CONSCIOUS, yet egoless. When he uses the word CHAOS, which he profoundly championed from the start of the century, he is leaving a key evidentiary clue and amusing himself. Austin Osman Spare's "CHAOS" is both a sugnature, and a signpost into future T.I.M.E. ( ChDVH (CH) = JOY=23) Thus we get CH-A.O.S. Both his name, and his confession of secret sorcery. " Art is the instinctive application of the knowledge latent in the subconscious" A.O.S. After Mrs. Paterson died, Spare was waiting to be inside her again. Fused with her sexual-magickal energy. Inside her also, in the sense of two liquids mixing to create a third amalgam. Two cosciousness' as well, the "THIRD MIND" of Brion Gysin. This is not romantic fiction. This is a prediction of some of the inter-dimensional forays that are subscribed to very convincingly by Terence McKenna, and other such botanical voyagers. In this key picture by Spare, what we are really seeing is both his projection into the actual future moment of his own death, and the way Mrs. Paterson looked exactly at the moment of her death overlaid. His aim in all his sorcery was to reunite his spirit and hers, captured within the dimensions of his artworks so that through this PROCESS they could both quite literally, live forever. An interesting twist on the idea of great art making the artist immortal! In this case I mean immortal quite literally. They do still live. Just as our concepts and assumptions about reality, and varieties of perception have been forever revised by the advent of virtual reality, and quantum psychology, so our concepts of linear existence are confounded by the manifestation held in stasis in these virtual mirrors. Keep in mind all ways the Cocteau "mirrors" the passing through. The "other side" where different rules of physics and continuity apply. We are finally accepting that everything is truly in constant flux, that the malleability of all matter and all constructs is not just theoretical, that T.I.M.E. is equally an energy and matter as flesh, and that projected images and virtual worlds are as valid and vibrant as the basic inherited consensus possibility that we tend to arrive trapped in squealing and pissing from our mother's vaginas. We are witnessing the realisation that everything everyone says is true. That evertything BELIEVED is real. That bodies are mere vehicles for transporting our BRAIN and that mortality is primarily a philosophical control process. Why, my children, even that dear old anarchist construct "The Bible" was assigned the alchemical message more significant than Mr. Robertson might chose to consider. "Have I not said that faith can move mountains" some old prophet or other! "The marvellous is not rare, incredulity is stronger than miracles" J.Rigaut. Apart from the more dramatic animations already mentioned, many unprompted witnesses have been shocked to see Mrs. Paterson's eyes close, open, cry, her whole head turn. Quite literally a living portrait. Magick makes "dreams" real, makes the impossible possible, focusses the Will to...Throughout occult circles in all ages crystal, water, polished metal, mirrors of all types have been used for oracular purposes. Spare's massive achievement is that he recognised the potential of art, of image, to be the most powerful magickal mirror of all. A window in T.I.M.E. An interface with death. An interdimensional modem. In his art he captures not just an image but a life-force. What seems to happen is that the individuals consciousness' contained within the art remain dormant in this reality until they come into contact with the minds of certain others, or as an intersection with linear T.I.M.E. sets in motion a preprogrammed "software" sequence of interactions. Primal, atavistic "aboriginal" peoples knew this. Sometimes facilitated with botanical catalysts they would invest immense and potentially limitless powers in specific totem images and glyphs or sigils. This use of the image as scrying mirror and as neurological nuclear energy is very different as a function of "art" to the post-patronage, post-craftsperson 20th Century norm of Art, with that horribly big "A". In contemporary elitist art you actually don't get anything much back except aesthetics. You certainly don't get mum-mification and T.I.M.E. travel! But we must never forget that all art grew from sorcery, and from the concealment of gnostic, and alchemical proceedures from those who would be "King". Art was synonymous with, and a direct aspect of Magick. It was functional, and it was dedicated to the processing of immortality, and the opening and preservation of portals. ( By the way, I would argue that "cyberspace, or the PSYCHOSPHERE as I would prefer it was called, is an extension of this perception and function in just the same way and we are just glimpsing the beginnings of the somewhat cack-handed access we've so far realised.) Anyway...Spare achieved the forgotten. That which vested interests in all status quos considered impossible, even blasphemous; a two way comunication where HIS image reacts to and with the viewer. It has a life of its own. The nearest parallel, a virtual mirror in which you can see another world., one that we cannot touch, the glass remaining solid and frustrating us. What this energy held within his images is doing is transcending the barriers of observed T.I.M.E. so that what we are seeing is a five-dimensional object or image. This form of energy wills to have existed at all times, and wills to exist at all times. "One cannot traverse the mirror with impunity,it is not possible." J. Rigaut. An objective (Hah!) and critical survey of the available data would establish that perceptions occur as if in part there were no space, in part no T.I.M.E. Space and T.I.M.E. are not only the most immediate "certainties" for us, they are the most misleading, doomed to be discredited as separate and abstracted states imminently. They are also usually considered empirical certainties too since everything observable is said to happen as though it occured in Space and T.I.M.E. In the face of this overwhelming "certainty" it is understandable that "reason" should have the greatest difficulty in granting validity to the peculiar nature of "delerious" phenomena, or paranormal events. But anyone who does some amount of justice to the facts cannot but admit that their apparent space-timelessness is their most essential quality. The fact that we are totally unable to imagine a form of existence without Space or T.I.M.E. by no means proves that such an existence is, in itself, impossible, and, therefore, just as we cannot DRAW from an appearance of space-timelessness, any ABSOLUTE conclusion about a possible space-timeless form of existence, so we are not entitled to conclude from the apparent space-time quality of our perception that there is NO FORM of existence without Space and T.I.M.E. I would imagine though that any of you fortunate enough to have had a particularly enervating moment of psychedelic experience will be more empathetic to the speculative space-timeless state!  "The reverse is just as good as the right side:it is necessary to wait there." Jaques Rigaut. Just as "physics" now tends to allow for "limitedness of space", a relativisation, it is beginning with Catastrophe Theory/Fuzzy Geometry/Chaos Maths/and other quantum disciplines to posit a "limitedness" of both T.I.M.E. and Causality. In short, nothing is fixed, "IT'S OFFICIAL!", the possibilities alone are endless ( the banner/slogan of a magazine I founded in 1968 called COPULATORY HADES). "Conscious looking is a search for verification of the notions that impel the search, and all ways has a circular mirroring element within I.T."Genesis P-Orridge. In Spares most critical images, it seems a medium has been synthesised whereby the essence that survives death, but is usually beyond our communication, has been transmitted into an object that we are familiar with i.e. a painting or drawing. And we are therefore familiar with trying to interpret or receive information from. Because of the familiarity of the medium of painting, we don't put up paranormal, sceptical, or too many emotional barriers. We expect to try and see what the artist wanted to present, wanted to communicate ( though personally I see little of that in contemporary "deceptual art" as Gysin used to say) If Spare said he was going to capture himself within the frame and canvass, and facilitate immortality, or at least, a very different medium of mortality, demonstrating "life" after apparent death, most observers would switch off, or scream ridicule tinged with an inate fear of the unknowable. There would be an interference with the transmission. Because Spare seduces us by allowing us to dupe our SELF into assuming what we view is an artwork, a picture, when in fact it is a "photograph" of a mirror of an actual, or virtual reality, a mortality software if you will to, because of the self-deception we remain open-minded. This open-mindedness is essential to the functioning of the sorcery at the critical T.I.M.E. intersections that animate I.T. (New Year's Eve for example) and increases the chances that the phenomenon of actual physical changes. The observer, if fortunate enough, wills to see that which many of us in this rightly post-existentialist age choose not to believe in, or to be heartily sceptical of, namely living, moving, changing images of a post-death entity, or brain-essence. This is all as acutely programmed as any software, except, allah be praised, it's NOT binary, not an either/or programme. Which probably explains Spare's success, as, surprise surprise we DO NOT, never did, live in an either/or universe, and all binary systems are fallacious, serving only to block the righteous evolution and maximising of potential of our species, a species programmed in it's DNA for only one ultimate function, to transcend all need for a physical body, fixed in linear T.I.M.E. and Space. You will see this entity reacting to you, it receives and transmits direct into your conscious five senses. It must also be transmitting directly into your other levels of consciousness too, and your other hypereal senses. Presumably we transmit back to what is there, so what is there wills to change by absorbtion over the years as it reacts to and is triggered by all the various observers. All these factors mingle and mix, and mutate. Mutation, after all being the sincerest form of flattery. The "soul" (advert for the BRAIN as Dr. Timothy Leary once suggested to me) is generally said to be visible through the eyes, the mirror of the soul. The eyes, jewels of actual brain exposed directly to the outside. The neuro-visual screen of the BRAIN. In the key Spare work centered on Mrs. Paterson and executed in 1928, her eyes are neither open, nor shut, and this is true in many of Spare's virtual mirror works. They are neither rejecting the possibility of seeing a captured "soul", nor openly inviting I.T. This half-open, half-shut limbo suggests responsibility lies with the viewer to choose whether or not to commune with any frisky entities that manifest. In fact, on many occasions an interesting further mutation frequently occurs. The eyes become ALIEN, not disimilar from the classic Schwa portrayal. As if coated with an almost reptilian film of non-human skin. This alien quality seems to be amplified by Spare's technique of painting himself old when he was in fact young, and of course later, painting himself young when he was by then old. Forming an infinite envelope of T.I.M.E. in effect. Spare moves back and forth through T.I.M.E. as he succeeds in presenting us, via the image with the apparently impossible, or miraculous - IMMORTALITY. Sorcery has all ways made effective and functional use of the process of reversal to confound expectation even at the root of the most sacred and central scientific assumptions. "Lord Patchogue launches himself through the mirror a second time. A crash of splintering glass. Lord Patchogue stands before another mirror, facing Lord Patchogue. On his forehead, the cut is bleeding once again. Lord Patchogue repeats "I am a man trying not to die" And when he passes through the third mirror amidst a noise which is now familiar, he knows that he wills to meet Lord Patchogue whose forehead will be bleeding more heavily in the fourth mirror and who will tell him "I am a man trying not to die". Jaques Rigaut. The psyche, in its deepest reaches, seems well able to participate in an existence beyond the web of Space and T.I.M.E. This dimension is often dubbed "eternity", or "infinity" yet it actually seems to behave; if we for the moment take Spare's art as repreentative and more vitally, FUNCTIONAL, and in no way symbolic; as either a one way or two way mirror dependent for it's operation upon a translation of the unconscious, into a communicable image that bonds the actual atomic structures of the graphic image with its driving forces unlocked from the unconscious into a fixed or mobile source of power dependent upon previous viewers, and with more critically, our own individual abilities to interface directly with it. Accept nothing, assume nothing, all ways look further, be open-eyed as well as open-minded and don't kid your SELF." Genesis P-Orridge. Keeping the speculation simple for now. If in theory, as all matter is actually vibrating tiny particles with lots of groovy names, it is just possible that we could walk through walls. Then it is also theoretically possible to lock clusters of the same particles and energy into the fabric of an image giving it the ability to move, change, alter and animate its content. The only gap of credibility being first hand experience. We don't usually believe anything until it happens to us. We only really know what we have experienced, belief is rooted in recognition. Every now and then as I type, you'll not be surprised to know, I wonder if this is going to sound too "out there", "crazed" as you the observer read it. I already know it gets a little opaque, for which my less than humble apologies, and of course it assumes you know what the fuck I am referring to vis a vis the paintings themselves. Oh well, tough. This subject leads us to a bigger "picture" a discussion of the parallels between virtual space, the creation of deities, immortality and the Psychosphere from a Processean perspective that will to arrive on another occasion. But I digress...  Imagination opens to synthesis larger than the sum total of reason. New images reflect more than logical synthesis can produce. There is a radical discontinuity in every truly creative idea or discovery. "I.T.'s all a matter of T.I.M.E.." Genesis P-Orridge. Projection direct from image to viewer involves more than the logical mode of thinking. An idea cannot exist separate from an image. For example, the Virgin Mary image embodies the idea of "compassion" perhaps. A Goddess or God is a figurative image of an idea. Images are the root language of social freedom and self expansion as much as words and alphabets are the roots of social control and self limitation. Science attempts to explain the omniverse objectively (yes, even now most of them) therefore it cannot explain "art" or more particularly the unique effects or phenomena Spare generates within "art". This is not a possible function of Science. (To be fair Science is, now, thankfully, beginning to include the point of viewing in its theories to great effect.) Science cannot tell us why Spare's images can alter, why his faces change, eyes open and close, colours vary. Photographs are said to steal "souls" they certainly capture a moment in T.I.M.E. Freeze I.T. So do the images and oracles of "art". For art was originally revelatory, prophetic, functional, shamanic. Fully integrated into every detail and aspect of life. "He who transcends Time escapes necessity." Austin Osman Spare. Spare's images capture the PROCESS of creation, the thoughts of the creator, and the memories of the viewer. (CHANGE THE WAY TO PERCEIVE AND CHANGE ALL MEMORY - G.P-O.) These memories of the viewer recall past events and feelings that are more compact, briefer than when they took place originally. They are compressed. Memories are Past-T.I.M.E. accessed into Present-T.I.M.E. T.I.M.E. is not however linear, all T.I.M.E. exists similtaneously and points in every direction similtaneously. I.T. is quaquaversal, omnipresent, in fact, all the usual definitions of "GOD" in the Catholic Church. There is really no reason why Spare's paintings and images should not capture T.I.M.E., thought and experience, then recreate and expand it in the viewers mind. "All nature is a vast reflection of that which is within us, or else we could not know it." Austin Osman Spare. Subjective experience is no less "real" than objective conjecture. All roads lead to Rome in a mirror to mirror function. This function of mirroring is found in the trance state in a simple direct way. The higher techniques of idea and artist's illusory skills makes effects and phenomena active through the dimensions of Spacelessness and Timelessness in ways normally consigned to the sceptical parking lot of modem existence. T.I.M.E. mirrors T.I.M.E. "Embrace reality by imagination". Austin Osman Spare. Years of trying to rationalise inexplicable "experiences" dis-integrate and only the most extreme speculations and constructs of impossibility begin to get close to giving answers that we see and feel. We are "HERE TO GO" as Brion Gysin succinctly stated. But not just here to go into inner and outer space, though that PROCESS is one part and conceptual parcel of the final aspiration. We are here to go OUT of the physical body. To enter the solid pool of T.I.M.E. To be fully integrated into that matter, of T.I.M.E., that connects us with EVERY moment, in every direction, and every parallel or conflicting omniverse that ever was, wills to be, or intends to be. Intention is the key and the PROCESS is the product. "The Life Force is not blind. We are." Austin Osman Spare. T.I.M.E must be reassessed as a "SOLID" as a form of "CONSCIOUS-NESS" as the key element in the atomic scale. As the covert energy hidden in the Million and One names of deities. Life is ONLY a brief physical manifestation outside the circles of T.I.M.E. We can re-enter the T.I.M.E. pool, and we can re-manifest. This is exactly the same as entering the virtual wordl of "cyberspace/psychosphere" when you log on. Our appreciation of the implication of logging on must be developed from this deification perspective. Once logged on, we are vulnerable to all the agendas, traumas, neuroses, and brilliances of all other logged on individuals. We have re-entered a pool. No different to the pool of T.I.M.E., or the gene-pool, or "racial memory/DNA" pools. This pool I will to name the " SPATIAL MEMORY ". Our understanding of time travel, physicality, possibility, and the malleability of T.I.M.E. and existence in a new contrived virtual world is prophecised by Austin Osman Spare, by Brion Gysin, by many artists and creators. This shift in our perception of T.I.M.E. and mortality is going to be the most important arena of discussion and philosophical, cultural engineering in the 21st Century. "What is death? A great mutation to your next SELF." Austin Osman Spare. The primary quest in Art, Life, Science, Brain has become a quest for reliable, repeatable methods for inter-dimensional travel and communication. Beyond the body and through the prophetic portals. Einstein, Spare, Gysin, Leary, McKenna and all the other visionary synthesists have contributed to the cumulative effect upon which sorcery is based. We can all play. By being aware of the implication of logging on. By designing conceptual and physical grids within the Psychosphere to facilitate accurate post-physical travel. By shouldering the responsibility we have accessed of "GOD/GODDESS BUILDING" our actions are the PROCESS that leads to the final unity and the vanquishing once and for all of any, any, EITHER/OR paradigms at last. This is the T.I.M.E. which shall end. This is the calendar that ceases to exist. T.I.M.E. and LIFE are not synonymous or fixed. Both are solids and can be shaped to our WILL TO... "The man trying not to die has propelled himself into the very essence of the mirror; he walks automatically, without curiosity; he manipulates time; he speaks with refraction; he communes with sight itself, without expectation; because he cannot do otherwise. With each step another mirror shatters. Another life is captured. All times intersect in his eyes." Genesis P-Orridge/Jaques Rigaut. GENESIS P-ORRIDGE California 1995. 1.To be continued with a follow, detailed explication of the five Process-Eon Spheres of influence and the internal implication for immortality via the "internet" or Psychosphere. 2. For readers wanting to see/read more of Spare's works and ideas we suggest you write to the: TRANSMEDIA FOUND...NATION, P.O.Box 11534,OAKLAND, CA. 94611, USA. for a liist of available materials.