Dream Machine

Speaking of American Trancendentalism I came across this article in the Globe and Mail about Brion Gysin, Edmontonian, member of the beat generation, creator of the Dream Machine, William Burroughs collaborator and lover, and shaman. He is finally getting his due in a new documentary based on a biography written by another Edmontonian; John Gieger.

Back in the ninties I collaborated with Bruce Fletcher on a journal called Virus 23 published in Edmonton and wrote an article on Gysin.

Gysin grew up partly in Edmonton before leading a typically itinerant beat existence in Paris, London and Tangier. An enigmatic figure, even among Burroughs's coterie, he came up with the concept for the Dream Machine by accident. He was looking out of the window of a bus in 1958 while travelling to an artists' colony in Marseilles, and the flickering pattern of light through the trees gave him a feeling of transcendence.
Later, a young mathematician, Ian Sommerville, another within in the beat circle, helped to build the device. Gysin then spent years trying to peddle the invention to electronics and media companies. Long story short, his invention got no takers and Gysin died in relatively obscurity in Paris in 1986.
Only now is he getting his due. The Dream Machine is widely seen as much more than a mere device, as Gysin himself described it, but as an art piece, blending the Arabic patterns that influenced his work with his idea of a kind of almost mechanical abstraction that ran throughout his artistic work. For instance, Gysin is primarily known (and increasingly being rediscovered) for his “cut-ups,” pieces of newspaper joined randomly together.
What Burroughs and Gysin wanted was to fight societal control, to fight the middle-class normality that pervaded postwar America.
“Remember the transcendentalists in the American literary tradition – Emerson, Thoreau – and this whole tradition of individualism, of taking over your own world, whether it be Walden Pond or whatever,” Sheehan says. “It's often said that the beats were the 20th-century answer or echo of the transcendentalists. Again, ‘Take control, don't trust the Man. The control systems are out to get you. They are blasting at you their television and radio.'”
So Burroughs and Gysin's alternative was the Dream Machine. “And they literally were serious. They wanted to replace the television with these machines in everyone's suburban living room,” Sheehan adds.



Strange and wonderful visions of the counterculture

Based on John Geiger's well-received book Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine, Sheehan's compelling documentary delivers a culturally incisive job of unmasking Gysin. That's no small feat, considering the mercurial and spectre-like nature of a man who believed himself to be the reincarnation of the 10th-century King of Assassins and who counted writer William S. Burroughs, singer Marianne Faithfull and Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones among his friends and lovers.
Sheehan goes out of his way to prove that, for a man who lived in infamy and died (in 1986) in obscurity, Gysin's influence on today's culture extends beyond rap and dub poetry and into the emergence of audiences as creators of their own computer-made and distributed entertainment. Experts from stuffy neurosurgeons to hip DJs are interviewed in an attempt to shed light on Gysin as a visionary and the Dream Machine as a precursor to anything Apple Inc. puts an "i" in front of and sells to the creative masses: iPhones, iPods, iMovies.



A hit when it screened earlier this year at Toronto's Hot Docs Festival -- it was awarded a special jury prize for Canadian Documentary -- the film explores the life of Gysin, who was born in a Canadian military hospital in England in 1916, raised in Edmonton and lived the impoverished-yet-glamourous life glorified by the Beat writers. He left Canada for Paris, where he fraternized with the Surrealists and later lived in the Beat Hotel (where William S. Burroughs finished Naked Lunch and Allen Ginsberg wrote Kaddish); worked as a spy during the Second World War; and co-founded a restaurant for the expat community of Tangier, Morocco. A renaissance man, Gysin was a writer, an artist, and, perhaps most of all, an innovator; he was the originator of the "cut-up" technique (the literary process later used by Burroughs and others in which text is literally cut up, rearranged at random and reconstructed to make a new work). Sheehan, though, chooses to focus on the life of Gysin by filtering it through another one of his inventions: the dream machine.



Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic ... - Google Books Result



Interview with John Geiger
Author of Books on Brion Gysin and the Dream Machine
John Geiger is the author of four books. His first two concerned Arctic exploration. His next two, Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and The Dream Machine and Nothing Is True - Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin, concerned the Beat movement. In an age when many authors opt for specialization, publishing book after book on the same topic, the range of Mr. Geiger’s publications might strike the casual observer as odd. Here’s a guy who is a Governor and Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. What’s he doing writing about the Beats?
Impressed by the Gysin biography and curious to know more about the juxtaposition of Mr. Geiger’s interests, RealityStudio prepared the following interview questions and Mr. Geiger graciously agreed to respond.
RealityStudio: What first drew you to study Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, their peers and their era?
Geiger: I had written two books concerned with geographic exploration, and — at the time — didn’t want to write a third. I was interested in Gysin and Burroughs both as another kind of explorer, of inner space… I was also intrigued by the idea that someone like Gysin, a bohemian, gay, had come from Edmonton, Alberta, which was a small conservative town in the 1920s. He was such a fascinating creature, Brion: how is it that such a barren landscape — then — could produce such a harvest? But the idea for the book came from a lovely guy, James Grauerholz.



Interview with John Geiger(Pataphysics)

You’ve been working on this book for many years. What was the thing that really began your interest in Brion Gysin?
What surprised me was the discovery that Brion Gysin grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, which still has some very ‘old west’ sensibilities about the place, so you can well imagine what it would have been like in the 1920s, when Brion was there, growing up and receiving most of his schooling. It was a very conservative, small frontier town perched on the edge of the great forests of the North. It struck me as being remarkable that this kind of person could’ve come out of that kind of place. I think that exploration in our own time has been undertaken by people like William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, and I think in the case of Burroughs, a book like The Yagé Letters is very much a narrative of exploration, in the same way Ernest Shackleton’s narratives are. So to me, I was just conducting research into another very different manner of exploring. Those things together caught my interest. I was already aware of Gysin, but interestingly not throug! h Burroughs so much, although in hindsight I had seen his name obviously—you can hardly read Burroughs without seeing Gysin’s name or some reference to his ideas—but it was really through Paul Bowles that I first discovered him.
It’s interesting that right at the end of Semiotext(e)’s Burroughs Live, in a discussion with Allen Ginsberg, Burroughs mentions that Brion was a potent shaman. Certainly he had an erudite involvement with magic, and his availability to intuitive principles seems quite advanced. How did you take those things into consideration when you were writing the book?
When I first spoke to William Burroughs about the biography—he was an enthusiastic supporter—he made it very clear to me that the approach should be a conventional biography, and he felt that Brion needed to be taken seriously, and that there had been enough homages and remembrances, that really someone ought to just examine his life very carefully and set out the facts of that life. So, obviously his interest in ‘the other way,’ in what Burroughs called ‘the magical universe,’ was integral to Gysin’s character. I mean it’s something that he learned from the very earliest moments of his life from the Indian people he was encountering. Brion Gysin was always different, he wasn’t a normal child anymore than he was a normal adult, and consequently he found himself hanging out with people who were marginalized, even when he was a child. In the context of Canada in those years and p! robably even to this day, those people were aboriginal people, they were North American Indians. It was through those interactions that he first took magic mushrooms—that was when this interest really first took hold and he was introduced to an alternative approach to life and thought.



Key to Hallucinations Found

Almost fifty years ago, the beat poet Brion Gysin (1916 - 1986), described a visual hallucination that he experienced while riding a bus:
...Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseille. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me? (Brion Gysin, 21 December 1958)
Gysin, a writer and performance artist, though known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, which inspired writers like William S. Burroughs, was also the co-inventor (along with scientist Ian Sommerville) of the Dreamachine, a stroboscopic flicker device designed to be viewed with the eyes closed and produces visual stimuli.
At the end of his documentation, Gysin asks, "Was that a vision? What happened to me?"
PURKINJE PATTERNS
According to Dominic ffytche of the Institute of Psychiatry in London, and author of 'The Hodology of Hallucinations,' a study recently published in an issue of Cortex, "Fifty years on we are able to answer Gysin's question." Gysin's hallucinations were quite similar to what Jan Purkinje (1787-1869), the father of contemporary neuroscience, experienced as a child.
"I stand in the bright sunlight with closed eyes and face the sun. Then I move my outstretched, somewhat separated, fingers up and down in front of the eyes, so that they are alternately illuminated and shaded. In addition to the uniform yellow-red that one expects with closed eyes, there appear beautiful regular figures that are initially difficult to define but slowly become clearer. When we continue to move the fingers, the figure becomes more complex and fills the whole visual field. (Purkinje, 1819)
When Purkinje moved his fingers, he simulated an effect similar to that of Gysin's Dreamachine.
Because of the brevity and unpredictability of hallucinations, up until now, surprisingly little is known about brain changes that occur during hallucinations—one cannot anticipate when a hallucination will occur. The chances of capturing a hallucination during a brain scanning are small.
However, it has long been recognized that flashes of light at particular frequencies, like those experience by Gysin and Purkinje, produce hallucinations of intricate patterns and vivid colors. Indeed, these stimulated visual patterns are described as Purkinje patterns. For anyone who's confused out there, the Purkinje patterns ffytche describes in his paper are much more complicated than the stuff everyone sees after a camera flash or when we stare at the sun too long without protective eyewear. They're actually much more than that.
"They are more complex...entirely unexpected the first time you encounter them. At slow rates of flashing through closed lids you experience exactly what you might expect, a dull red light pulsing with each flash. At the critical frequency the whole thing changes and colours, patterns and forms appear. The Beat poet Brion Gysin's description puts it better than I can."
Most people have a rough idea of what a hallucination experience might be like, but when it comes to defining a hallucination, that's more difficult. If a hallucination is defined as 'seeing or hearing something that is not actually there,' then dreams and imagery would be considered hallucinations.
According to ffytche, visual hallucinations, (people do hallucinate with other senses), "are located in the world around us, not in the mind's eye. They are not under our control, in the sense that we cannot bring them on or change them as they occur. They also look real and vivid, although the things one sees may be bizarre and impossible. Purkinje phenomena meet all these criteria and can thus be considered true hallucinations.
However, Purkinje phenomena are induced by experiment rather than occurring spontaneously as in the Charles Bonnet Syndrome, an eye disease that causes patients to have complex hallucinations. ffytche points out:
"We are only beginning to understand just how common this Syndrome is, partly because patients have been unwilling to admit their hallucinations for fear of being labeled as having serious mental illness. Charles Bonnet Syndrome patients almost all hallucinate patterns and geometrical forms identical to Purkinje phenomena. Many also see figures, objects and faces, the types of experience we generally associate with hallucinations. The hope is that what we learn from the Purkinje phenomena will also apply to these other hallucination experiences."
ffytche also adds that "most people will experience Purkinje hallucinations under appropriate conditions of visual stimulation, although their clarity and ease of induction varies from subject to subject. I have only encountered a few subjects who do not seem to have the experiences for reasons I do not fully understand. I assume the visual systems of such 'immune' subjects are wired up in a slightly different way."



SEE:

HOWL

New Age Libertarian Manifesto

100 years of the Avante-Garde 1905-2005

Kenneth Patchen

Tags
American Transcendentalism, Brion Gysin,
William Burroughs,
counter culture,
Edmonton,
John Geiger, dream machine,
beat culture,
Nik Sheehan,

Henry David Thoreau Weeps

The father of American Transcendentalism , individualist anarchism and environmentalism would weep. A pond is such a small thing and yet it reveals the seriousness of climate change and the ensuing mass extinction of species caused by capitalism.

For the past few years, Davis and colleagues from Harvard and Boston University have been perusing the notebooks of the famous naturalist and philosopher Henry David Thoreau, using his notes about his sanctuary at Walden Pond to uncover the drastic effects of climate change. With his graduate student, Abraham J. Miller-Rushing, Primack stumbled upon Thoreau’s observations of changes in plant flowering times and species occurrences over time. “It became the gold mine,” Primack said. “What was great was that Thoreau was so famous and that his records were the oldest we found in the United States.” Together with his graduate students, Charlie G. Willis and Brad R. Ruhfel, Davis compiled an evolutionary tree of the entire community of flora that had existed in the Concord area in the mid-19th century. “Using phylogenies to think about interesting patterns of bioevolution and global [climate] change just seemed like a perfect avenue to think about this pattern of species loss using a novel evolutionary perspective,” Davis said. Primack and Miller-Rushing had observed that the plants around Walden Pond were producing flowers on average more than a week earlier than they were in Thoreau’s time, when temperatures were 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit lower. The shift in flowering times, however, was not uniform—some species groups were flowering more than three weeks earlier, while others were flowering “like clockwork around mid-May,” Davis said. Applying these data to an evolutionary perspective, the researcher--s found that the species that adjusted to the changing climate survived, while the “clockwork” plants had declined in number. “The real downer about this all is that the groups that are being hardest hit are our most cherished temperate flowering species: orchids, buttercups, roses, dogwoods, violets,” Davis said. “These are the kind of species that people go out on botanical forays to see, and now they can’t see them.” Davis said that about one-quarter of the plants Thoreau observed in his notebooks have become extinct, and that 36 percent now are in such low abundance that they are “hanging by a thread.”

Walden; Or, Life in the Woods.
White Pond and Walden are great crystals on the surface of the earth, Lakes of Light. If they were permanently congealed, and small enough to be clutched, they would, perchance, be carried off by slaves, like precious stones, to adorn the heads of emperors; but being liquid, and ample, and secured to us and our successors forever, we disregard them, and run after the diamond of Kohinoor. They are too pure to have a market value; they contain no muck. How much more beautiful than our lives, how much more transparent than our characters, are they! We never learned meanness of them. How much fairer than the pool before the farmers door, in which his ducks swim! Hither the clean wild ducks come. Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth..

American Transcendentalism (AT): A Brief Introduction

Basic Premises:
1. An individual is the spiritual center of the universe - and in an individual can be found the clue to nature, history and, ultimately, the cosmos itself. It is not a rejection of the existence of God, but a preference to explain an individual and the world in terms of an individual.
2. The structure of the universe literally duplicates the structure of the individual self - all knowledge, therefore, begins with self-knowledge. This is similar to Aristotle's dictum "know thyself."
3. Transcendentalists accepted the neo-Platonic conception of nature as a living mystery, full of signs - nature is symbolic.
4. The belief that individual virtue and happiness depend upon self-realization - this depends upon the reconciliation of two universal psychological tendencies:
a. the expansive or self-transcending tendency - a desire to embrace the whole world - to know and become one with the world.
b. the contracting or self-asserting tendency - the desire to withdraw, remain unique and separate - an egotistical existence.
This dualism assumes our two psychological needs; the contracting: being unique, different, special, having a racial identity,ego-centered, selfish, and so on; the expansive: being the same as others, altruistic, be one of the human race, and so on.
The transcendentalist expectation is to move from the contracting to the expansive. This dualism has aspects of Freudian id and superego; the Jungian shadow and persona, the Chinese ying/yang, and the Hindu movement from Atman (egotistic existence) to Brahma (cosmic existence).

THOREAU'S PENCILS
Thoreau's clay-mixed graphite wasn't entirely original. The Germans had used something like it a few years earlier. It's not clear whether Thoreau had any inkling of the German process. But what is clear is that he transcended it. He developed a new grinding mill. He developed all sorts of process details. Historian Henry Petroski adds to the list of Thoreau's inventions -- a pipe forming machine, water wheel designs. They probably never told you in your English class that Thoreau often signed the words "Civil Engineer" after his name. Yet Thoreau was content to walk away from an invention without making personal profit of it. He was, after all, the same man who wrote ;... the seventh day should be man's day of toil ... and the other six his Sabbath of the affections and the soul -- in which to range this widespread garden, and drink in the soft influences and sublime revelations of Nature ...

Many readers mistake Henry's tone in Walden and other works, thinking he was a cranky hermit. That was far from the case, as one of his young neighbors and Edward Emerson attest. He found greater joy in his daily life than most people ever would. He traveled often, to the Maine woods and to Cape Cod several times, and was particularly interested in the frontier and Indians. He opposed the government for waging the Mexican war (to extend slavery) eloquently in Resistance to Civil Government, based on his brief experience in jail; he lectured against slavery in an abolitionist lecture, Slavery in Massachusetts. He even supported John Brown's efforts to end slavery after meeting him in Concord, as in A Plea for Captain John Brown.

Referring to the American government, the greatest American Anarchist, David Thoreau, said: "Government, what is it but a tradition, though a recent one, endeavoring to transmit itself unimpaired to posterity, but each instance losing its integrity; it has not the vitality and force of a single living man. Law never made man a whit more just; and by means of their respect for it, even the well disposed are daily made agents of injustice."

Ziga Vodovnik interviews Howard Zinn — Rebels Against Tyranny.
There is, of course, much with which to disagree, but overall, it's a valuable read, especially the parts about the philosophy's American history:
One of the problems with dealing with anarchism is that there are many people whose ideas are anarchist, but who do not necessarily call themselves anarchists. The word was first used by Proudhon in the middle of the 19th century, but actually there were anarchist ideas that proceeded Proudhon, those in Europe and also in the United States. For instance, there are some ideas of Thomas Paine, who was not an anarchist, who would not call himself an anarchist, but he was suspicious of government. Also Henry David Thoreau. He does not know the word anarchism, and does not use the word anarchism, but Thoreau’s ideas are very close to anarchism. He is very hostile to all forms of government. If we trace origins of anarchism in the United States, then probably Thoreau is the closest you can come to an early American anarchist. You do not really encounter anarchism until after the Civil War, when you have European anarchists, especially German anarchists, coming to the United States. They actually begin to organize. The first time that anarchism has an organized force and becomes publicly known in the United States is in Chicago at the time of Haymarket Affair.[....]Well, the Transcendentalism is, we might say, an early form of anarchism. The Transcendentalists also did not call themselves anarchists, but there are anarchist ideas in their thinking and in their literature. In many ways Herman Melville shows some of those anarchist ideas. They were all suspicious of authority. We might say that the Transcendentalism played a role in creating an atmosphere of skepticism towards authority, towards government.

Traditional individualist anarchism
Theorists in traditional American individualism (historically called "Boston anarchism" at times, often derogatorily) include Josiah Warren, Ezra Heywood, William B. Greene, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner,Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Henry David Thoreau. Josiah Warren is commonly regarded as the first individualist anarchist in the American tradition. He had participated in a failed collectivist experiment called "New Harmony" and came to the conclusion that such a system is inferior to one where individualism and private property is respected. He details his conclusions in regard to this collectivist experiment in Equitable Commerce. In a quote from that text that illustrates his radical individualism, he says: "Society must be so converted as to preserve the SOVEREIGNTY OF EVERY INDIVIDUAL inviolate. That it must avoid all combinations and connections of persons and interests, and all other arrangements which will not leave every individual at all times at liberty to dispose of his or her person, and time, and property in any manner in which his or her feelings or judgment may dictate. WITHOUT INVOLVING THE PERSONS OR INTERESTS OF OTHERS" (Tucker's emphasis). Warren coined the phrase "Cost the limit of price" to refer to his interpretation of Adam Smith's labor theory of value. The labor theory holds that the value of a commodity is equal to the amount of labor required to produce or acquire it. Warren maintains, therefore, that the price of labor of one individual must be equal to the production of the equivalent amount of labor of every other individual. And, consequently, that an employer who labors not, but retains a portion of the produce of an employee as profit is guilty of violating the "cost principle" --he recieves payment without cost to himself. Warren regards this practice as "invasive." If an employer is to be paid, he must not be paid unless he labors. In 1827, Warren put his theories into practive by starting a business that he called a "labor for labor store" in Cincinatti, Ohio. Warren, like all the American individualists, that followed was a strong supporter of the right of individuals to retain the product of their labor as private property. Josiah Warren (1799-1874) was an American social reformer and commonly regarded as the first individualist anarchist. ... Ezra Heywood was a 19th century North American individualist anarchist, slavery abolitionist, and feminist. ... Benjamin Tucker (April 17, 1854 - 1939) was Americas leading proponent of individualist anarchism in the 19th century. ... Lysander Spooner (January 19, 1808 - May 14, 1887) was an American political philosopher, abolitionist, and legal theorist of the 19th century. ... Stephen Pearl Andrews (March 22, 1812 - May 21, 1886) was an anarchist. ... Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862; born David Henry Thoreau) was an American author, pacifist, tax resister and philosopher who is most famous for his essays Walden on appreciation of nature and Civil Disobedience (available at wikisource) on civil disobedience. ... New Harmony is a town located in Posey County, Indiana. ... His Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was one of the earliest attempts to study the historical development of industry and commerce in Europe. ... The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory in economics and political economy concerning a market-oriented or commodity-producing society: the theory equates the value of an exchangeable good or service (i. ...

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about:Walden, individualist anarchism, capitalism, industrialization, envrionment, mass-extinction, flowers, species, biology, ecology, David Henry Thoreau, American Transcendentalism

Consumption=Death

Today is Buy Nothing Day....yesterday was Black Friday....and it lived up to its name as frenzied American consumers like rogue elephants stomped to death a worker in order to get in on the discount prices. Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death

Like the rush to make a quick buck off the housing boom, this rush to consume is part and parcel of the psychopathology of capitalism. It is the current variation of the emotional plaque; whereby the world is going to hell in a handbasket, so lets consume ourselves to death.

At least one writer suggests that the alternative to these two faces of the same coin(Buy Nothing Day/Black Friday), is to actually produce something, to make your own toys or at least consume locally made goods.

The great myth of the middle class was a social construction of post WWII capitalist economies, especially the growing service based economy, is that we are not producers/workers but consumers. After 9/11 George Bush told America to consume, it is this consumption that results not only in the death of workers in shopping frenzies but the mass exctinction of species on the planet and the climate crisis.

Find blog posts, photos, events and more off-site about: shopping, boom, bust, boomers, consumers, debt, personal debt, debt, Black Friday, mass extinction, buy nothing day, death,