by Jon Rappoport
June 4, 2011
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Traditionally the gaze was conceived as a way of fingering, of touching. The old Greeks spoke about looking as a way of sending out my…soul’s limbs, to touch your face and establish a relationship between the two of us which is this relationship, and this relationship was called vision. Then, after Galileo at the time of Kepler, the idea developed that the eyes are receptors into which light brings something from the outside…People began to conceive of their eyes as some kind of camera obscura. In our age people conceive of their eyes and actually use them as if they were part of a machinery. They speak about interface. Anybody who says to me, I want to have an interface with you, I say please go somewhere else, to a toilet or wherever you want, to a mirror…can’t you recognize that there’s a deep otherness between me and you, so deep that it would be offensive for me to be programmed in the same way you are.
(Ivan Illich, interviewed by Jerry Brown, KPFA, March 22, 1996)
Unlike other of my projects, The Magician Awakes will probably never end. Right now, it’s scattered in 20 or 30 places, several of which are lost owing to a hard-drive crash…which is okay, because the structure of the book allows something like that to happen.
It’s in taped talks, in pictures, in essays, in fragments of fiction, in poems. It doesn’t move in a straight line.
So today, I write a few more pieces of it.
I was planning an interview with Salvador Dali. I thought I would have him explain things he would never have bothered to explain while he was alive. It seemed like a good idea. But then, as I began to punch keys, I realized this wouldn’t work. For example: “You haven’t seen most of my paintings. They’re underneath the layers of the ones you know. They’re quite ordinary. A glass on a table. A soldier drinking coffee at a truck stop. A necklace on velvet. This is my real work. I’m a hack. I’m a machine that went haywire. You ask for something extraordinary, all of you. You keep refining your need for the amazing. If a person talks to you and then doubles back on what he’s saying, you’re disgusted. You want a trip to Mars to have certain qualities which symbolically represent your addiction. If a flying saucer turns out to be an object that was sitting under a cup of coffee, you want to kill someone. I find that interesting. It’s literal-mindedness taken to such purity it’s a little fascist empire of The Astonishing. Your personal museum.”
I was sitting at my desk and wondering what would happen if the objects on it became words in a language. The envelope, the pen, the headphones, the hammer, the clock, the keys. The dullness of such a language could be enormous. It might envelop the world. People would fall asleep in the middle of conversations. Then they would dream in that language, and look for a way out. But to what destination would they want to flee? I think it would be a courtroom, where decisions are rendered in simple terms. Justice delivered in bromides. Final decisions. It looks good, but nothing changes.
Saint Joseph of Cupertino (1603-1663) was witnessed as he levitated. Many times. Occasionally to a great height. Once after kissing the foot of the Pope in his chamber. He had to be ordered back down. In some respects, Joseph was an idiot. He was obsessed with devotion to the cosmological artifacts of the Church. It just goes to show. Would you sacrifice your personality to fly a hundred feet into the air? I know people who would. I believe this subject would make an interesting Sunday sermon.
Public relations is in the business of manufacturing clowns. If you’ve ever been the subject of a real campaign, you’ve experienced it. Magic as animation. A doctor moves along at your side, injecting you with local anesthetics and carving away pieces of you. By the end, you’ll believe anything. You’ll believe there is a wheel of karma, and you’re turning on it. Or the moon is a coin in your pocket. But you have no power over the moon. It just sits there in your pants, and occasionally you take it out, to see what it looks like without a sun to shine on it.
I used to think waking up was done in a straight line. But each time I found a line to walk, it led me to a smaller place. A place where I could possess one and only idea: I’m awake.
Obviously, the telephone should have been invented after the computer. The phone is so much more inflected. In the same way, magic should have been invented after the establishing of modern civilization. Well, it turns out that is the case. We are inventing magic now. And it has very little to do with technology. But that doesn’t mean it’s simple. Let me offer you a provisional hypothesis. When you apply Simple (even if it is stunningly lucid) to the world, Simple begins to deteriorate in a few hours. It’s wonderful, it’s delightful, it may even be ecstatic, but it’s kindergarten magic.
People love the new sheriff who comes into town and takes care of the bastards. I suppose I’m as addicted to it as the next person. But at least I understand that the clapboard hotel has tunnels under it, and the tunnels lead to the center of the Earth. And then there is this: there is no center. There is a place called a center, and it can be correctly measured, but it doesn’t give you a gun you can shoot, so that you can wipe out your mind. If you want that, try the little white church with the steeple at the end of Main Street. They might have something for you.
There is a notion that if pressure were taken off the minds of people, if they were released from controls imposed from the outside, if things were more just, the natural life would flow like honey. I’ve never seen that happen. Here is something I have seen: citizens trying (and failing) to impose a tyranny based on demanding a three-word answer to a profound question. There is a clue in this. If the answer has to come in three words, then the question wasn’t really deep. The words of the question may have been impressive, but it was being asked from the inside of a cartoon casino, where everything is cast in plastic, and people are sitting at roulette tables and slots, and watch keno and bet on blackjack. And they’re all trying to beat the house with cons. And later, they’re standing out on the sidewalk with drinks in their hands, wishing they could collar a random person passing by and make some kind of citizen’s arrest.
(To read about Jon’s mega-collection, The Matrix Revealed, click here.)
Jon Rappoport
The author of three explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED, EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, and POWER OUTSIDE THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29th District of California. He maintains a consulting practice for private clients, the purpose of which is the expansion of personal creative power. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, he has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years, writing articles on politics, medicine, and health for CBS Healthwatch, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, Stern, and other newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe. Jon has delivered lectures and seminars on global politics, health, logic, and creative power to audiences around the world. You can sign up for his free NoMoreFakeNews emails here or his free OutsideTheRealityMachine emails here.