Paul Klee: man of mystery, joy, and revolution

by Jon Rappoport

March 11, 2015

NoMoreFakeNews.com

OutsideTheRealityMachine

“God forbid people should learn anything from artists. Entangled confusions might dissolve. Synthetic ambitions might disappear along with entire histories. An old life gone, a new one begun. Hurricanes of inspiration might shear columns of rigid ideals, and the original dawn that gave rise to those ideals might emerge again, above the open road…” (The Magician Awakes, Jon Rappoport)

Paul Klee was one of those spirits who transmuted everything he came in contact with—effortlessly. It was in his bones, his blood, his heart, his mind, his psyche: the act of transformation.

The poet e.e. cummings once wrote, “There’s a hell of a good universe next door, let’s go.” Klee went, every day of his life. And he was not committed to one particular alternative. He invented them by the truckload. This, as opposed to organized religions, each of which invents ONE cosmic mural and tries to back people into a corner with it.

Klee never focused on developing a trademark style. He saw One Style as a limiter, a defection from the real joy of painting. He was a man who had many desires, recognized that fact, and painted all of them.

He exudes the sense of: “Give me a small room, a pad of paper, a few colors and brushes, and close the door behind you.”

Almost everything he did was by way of improvisation.

Critics downplay this last fact, because for them it amounts to cheating: spontaneity is only permitted when there are many signs and stories of struggle. Klee avoided becoming enmeshed in struggle by working on a number of paintings at once. When he was finished for the moment with one, he moved to another, and so on, and kept revisiting the incomplete works and adding to them until he was satisfied.

Klee was what I would call a sane man. He knew how to begin, he knew how to end. He knew that the next painting was more important than the last. He didn’t need self-pity, and he didn’t care for outlandish praise.

He wasn’t trying to be recognized for certain traits. He had found gold, and he kept mining it. He realized that imagination is an infinitely forked river, and he needed no propulsive agenda to drive him forward. One, two, three strokes on a blank canvas and he was able to invent what could come next. “Could” was never “should” or “must.” It was all open, his spaces.

He was not trying to solve a problem. Nor, as some have said, was he asking questions in his paintings.

Each small painting was a world unto itself.

He never titled a painting until it was finished. Then he looked at it and thought up a name, which was sometimes laid on as a description, and sometimes given as a statement about what the picture was not.

Even Picasso, who reserved praise for his own fabulous self as a matter of principle, once visited Klee in his studio and acknowledged the brilliance of another man. Through clenched teeth, no doubt.

For Klee, the blank canvas signaled the delicious unknown. He was very comfortably nowhere at that moment, and then as he painted, he was in a successive series of somewheres.

Kandinsky and Klee mark a point of demarcation for painting. It was not enough to alter the so-called real world. You could actually create a new world in every picture. A different new world. There were as many as you wanted to dream up.

Klee did not give credence to having a finished idea in his mind before starting a work. He was not transferring a picture in his mind to the canvas. He was inventing/discovering as he went along. In this, he was happy.

He could be very precise, and he could be imprecise. A world does not have to be precise.

Some say his work was too easy. It was too celebrative. It didn’t present some final vision. It lacked maturity. The emotions were too simple.

All these judgments are off the mark. They represent estimates of what Klee was not. What he was, was marvelously direct. Is Mars too red? Is Mercury too hot?

Do androids dream, as Phil Dick asked, of electric sheep? Do ants dream of balloons? Why not? And if so, why not paint that?

Paul Klee. 1879-1940. There is a little (out-of-print) book titled Klee, with a long, fascinating essay by Marcel Marnat. Publisher: Leon Amiel (1974). Many plates.

Several paintings I recommend: The Red Fish (1925); Head with Blue Tones (1933); 17IRR (1923).

I believe Klee was saying this: Here are several thousand worlds I just invented. Approach them with a free mind and heart. Glance at them from several different angles. Jump into their liquids, stand on their flat surfaces, lean from their precarious platforms. Serve them to yourself as appetizers or main courses. Let them pass through your digestive tract. Make faces to match their faces. Remove their masks; then you may find deeper shades or you may find nothing. Ponder how you invest your imagination in mine, and go away with a spark of self-recognition, recognition of what you have, what you can do, what you can invent. Our whole planet is a mask, and we can take great delight in dreaming up new spaces and times.

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 29^th 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 emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

by Jon Rappoport

(To join our email list, click here.)

On May 29, 1913, in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, a riot broke out.

After the curtain went up on the premiere of The Rite of Spring, it took only a few minutes for the tumult to begin.

Boos, hisses, catcalls, people throwing objects at the stage… The roar of the crowd quickly became so loud, the dancers lost their cues.

And the music. It was a whisper, a pounding scream, sheets of brass, harsh relentless rhythms breaking against one another, cliffs suddenly colliding and collapsing in the air.

The police arrived and shut the program down.

Stravinsky, at 28, had arrived on the world scene.

Never again would he compose music so challenging. Later in his life, after he had taken up a position as a champion of new classicism, he would conduct a recording of the Rite that was modulated to a bare shadow of its former self.

But the revolution had happened.

Much has been written about the premiere and the Rite. A great deal of programmatic explanation has been offered to “make sense” out of the piece of music: after all, it was a ballet with a plot, and the themes had to do with primitive ritual sacrifices in a fanciful pagan world.

You can also find scholarly work on the structure of the Rite, indicating a possible borrowed background of several Eastern European folk melodies.

Formidable creations of imagination are often diluted by referring the audience to other works and periods of time and influences—to explain the incomprehensible.

But the fact is, to absorb a work of imagination, one has to use his own imagination.

Since this is considered unlikely, pundits earnestly help us with step-down contexts, so that we can understand the work in pedestrian terms. In other words, so we can reduce it to nothing.

Fundamentally, it is its own world. It immediately and finally presents itself as a universe apart from easy references and tie-ins and links.

So when you listen to the Rite, you are, gratefully, alone with the music. In this regard, I recommend one recording. The 1958 Leonard Bernstein-New York Philharmonic, available as Sony SMK 47629. It’s the 1992 Bernstein Royal Edition. Le Sacre Du Printemps.

Bernstein, one of the geniuses of the 20th century, was no stranger to encountering imagination with imagination. And yet, as the conductor, he had no need to distort the score. If anything, he was more faithful to it and the composer’s great intent than any other conductor, past or present.

In 1912 and 1913, Stravinsky had composed the Rite in a reckless frame of mind. This did not mean he abandoned all he knew; it meant he wanted to show everyone how dim the perception of music had become. “To hell with all of them.”

He took the large orchestra and shredded the conventional relationships between its various sections. Instead, he made it an ocean in a storm. He crossed all lines. He crashed together old sounds and new sounds. He destroyed pleasant mesmerizing rhythms.

But there was nothing primitive about his undertaking. He made something new, something no one could have predicted.

As you listen to it, you may find one part of your mind repeating, this is not music, this is not music. Just keep listening. Five times, 50 times, 100 times.

There are artists like Stravinsky, like the Spanish architect Gaudi, like Edgar Varese, like the often-reviled American writer Henry Miller, like Walt Whitman (although Whitman has been grotesquely co-opted into a Norman Rockwell-like prefect), like the several great Mexican muralists—all of whom transmit an oceanic quality.

As in, The Flood.

There is a fear that, if such artists were unleashed to produce their work on a grand scale—and if the societal chains of perception were removed—they would take over the world.

This is the real reason there was a riot at the Theatre des Champs Elysees on May 29, 1913. Even though Stravinsky was presenting a universe of his own making, people instinctively felt that the music could spill over into the streets of Paris…and after that, where would it go? What would stop it?

Their fear was justified.

Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.

That this has not happened for the best is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.

Who knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected, in favor of the shape we now think of as central and eternal?

We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.

And still, it takes imagination and creating to give us what we have now. But often it is a harnessed imagination that accedes to a stolid esthetic that replaces daring and vast improvisation with classical forms and formats, long after their time.

We peek between the fluted columns to see what the future might hold. We speculate, for example, that information itself might be alive and might flow in from our own DNA to bring about a new cyber-brain step in evolution. Information? What further evidence do we need that our society is heading down a slope to the swamp?

If Rite of Spring and other works of that magnitude are information, a wooden duck on a doily is Shakespeare.

Mere information is the wood scrapings and the stone chips Brancusi swept up in his studio and put out in the alley. Information is the dried flattened tubes of paint Matisse disposed of with the old newspapers. Information is the heap of wires Tesla tossed in the garbage.

Information is the neutral boil-down left over after the artist has made his mark.

Creation is not neutral.

It flows out into the atmosphere with all its subjective force.

That is what happened on May 29, 1913.

And that is what evoked the mass fear.

The critics would have declared Salvador Dali a lunatic if he hadn’t had such formidable classical painting skills.

He placed his repeating images (the notorious melting watch, the face and body of his wife, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any familiar object.

This was quite troubling to many people. If an immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book (on the same canvas), where were all the accoutrements and assurances of modern comfortable living?

Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?

Where was a protective class structure that depended on nothing more than money and cultural slogans?

Dali invented vast comedies on canvas. But the overall joke turned, as the viewer’s eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing interlude of music, a memory of something that had never happened, a gang of genies coming out of corked bottles. A bewildering mix of attitudes sprang out from the paintings.

What was the man doing? Was he making fun of the audience? Was he simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?

Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.

But they didn’t fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work. However, his explications were handed out in a way that made it plain he was telling tall tales—interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall tales.

Every interview and press conference he gave, gave birth to more attacks on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying with the press like some perverse Olympian?

Critics flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.

It comes back to this: when you invent something truly novel, you know that you are going to stir the forces trapped within others that aspire to do the very same thing. You know that others are going to begin by denying that anything truly NEW even exists. That DOES make it a comedy, whether you want to admit it or not.

It is possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive (and contradictory) persona.

Commentators who try to take on Dali’s life usually center on the early death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali’s “basic confusion”—which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.

However, these days, with good reason, we might more correctly say that Dali was playing the media game on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)—some fiction was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.

He was creating a self that matched his paintings.

It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.

But of course Dali’s work was not about realism.

The most complex paintings—see, for example, Christopher Columbus Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador—brilliantly orchestrated the interpenetration of various solidities/ realities, more or less occupying the same space.

I’m sure that if Dali were living today, he would execute a brain-bending UFO landing on the front lawn of the White House. Such a painting would envelop the viewer with simultaneous dimensions colliding outside the president’s mansion.

At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what he could assemble in the same space—and there was no limit to the number of spaces he could corral into the same canvas. A painting could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.

Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at Dali’s skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch Renaissance masters.

They hate the dissonance. They resent Dali’s mordant wit and rankle at the idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes in such fierce extended detail.

But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a painter turn reality upside down so blatantly, while rubbing their faces in it.

The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was unfair. The scholars were “devoted to the truth.” The painter was free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.

Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, “You people are like me. We’re all doing fiction. I’m much better at it. In the process, I get at a much deeper truth.”

Dali was the hallucinogenic toreador. He was holding off and skirting the charges of the critics and the historians. They rushed at him. He moved with his cape—and danced out of the way.

The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one recognizable caricature forever, must be IDed, must have one basic function. Must—as a civilization goes down the trail of decline—be watched and recorded and profiled.

When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the same time, the Order trembles.

(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.

This rule (“being the only thing you are”) guarantees that human beings will resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one continuum of space and time. One. Only one. Forever. The biggest joke of all. The big lie.

Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.

He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers, improvised like odd-shaped and meticulous reveries.

He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.

How harsh for conventional critics to discover that nothing in Dali’s education produced an explanation for his ability to render an object so perfectly on the canvas. It was almost as if, deciding that he would present competing circumstances inside one painting, he perversely ENABLED himself to do the job with such exacting skill, “making subversive photographs come to life.”

That was too much.

But there the paintings are.

Imagination realized.

Like it or not, Dali paved the way for many others. He opened doors and windows.

And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major institutions (organized religion, psychology, education, government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals the prison break in progress.

More people understand that the veil is not really a veil of tears. It’s a curtain madly drawn across the creative force.

The pot is boiling. People want out.

Somewhere along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative power. That is the first great day. That’s the dawn of no coerced boundaries. Everything we’ve been taught tells us that a life lived entirely from creative power is impossible. We don’t have it within us. We should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater official power and wisdom. We must abide by the rules. We must, at best, “surrender to the universe.”

But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is us? Is simply one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out of reach? What if it turns out that we are the perverse ones and Dali is quite normal?

What if we pop out of the fences of this culture and this continuum and this tired movie called planet Earth?

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 29^th 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 emails at NoMoreFakeNews.com or OutsideTheRealityMachine.

What artists reveal down through time

by Jon Rappoport

July 7, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

“You can build an unlimited number of harmonies and achieve what most people think of as perfection. But then what? You face a dead-end. So you have to keep making harmonies, over and over, and pretend you aren’t bored. This process is hypnotic and it drains away energy. You may seem to be imitating Nature’s symmetries, but suppose Nature is becoming bored, too? Suppose souls have other impulses which, if exercised, reveal forces and creations that have no names, which we loosely call Art? Suppose we are all artists waiting for something to happen—and nothing will happen, until we put brush to canvas and liberate and invent the deepest aspect of ourselves?” — Jon Rappoport, The Underground

Societies, cultures, religions, philosophies tend to believe and promote certain key ideas.

Among them: the need to imitate Nature; the preference for and worship of a notion of Harmony; and the adherence to some final metaphysical Reality.

These ideas have served useful purposes, while also sowing discord.

But artists have been delivering very different messages, which like quicksilver are more difficult to grasp—and impossible to codify.

For example: there is no need to copy Nature; the obsessive injunction toward establishing Harmony is unnecessary and confining; and there is no final metaphysical Reality.

There is, instead, an endless imagining and creating of new Realities.

Harmony is a strategy that can be employed or discarded.

The artist tells consciousness that What Already Is is always provisional.

The universe is waiting for imagination to revolutionize it down to its core. Not through some mechanistic technology, but through sheer multi-dimensional art.

These cardinal aspects of doing art delineate what is spiritual, what a spiritual path consists of.

Metaphysical content, as “spiritual information,” is a poor substitute.

In this sense, religion is frozen poetry, as if some priest class fastened on to a few dozen stanzas of a poet’s journey and iced them down into doctrine.

Art exists out past the boundaries of all reductionist ideas.

As an embracing ideal, harmony, in the long run, proves to be a false idol. At first, through balance, equilibrium, symmetry, mathematical precision, it appears to summarize and organize the deepest human dreams and hopes.

But it eventually withers, because it is a summary. It’s perfection that holds up a mirror to itself, a solipsistic skeleton.

One could look at the most provocative figures of Rodin and analyze them for balanced masses—but the true impact would then be lost. The force of life, the projected energy, gone.

Populations are trained like dogs to expect a climax, an opportune end to a story of existence…but an endless journey of individual creation? This has no hypnotic power. It doesn’t resonate with the fervent wish for a closed system.

Therefore, it is cast aside.

Matisse paints his red room, Van Gogh his startling irises, Lennie Tristano his tumbling effervescent rivers, Bob Graettinger his city of glass, Lenny Bruce his war of the roses against the establishment, and people draw back, resentful that their mantra of equal balance and symmetry is being interrupted.

People interpret these works as destructive—and they are. They’re destructive of an inner order of sleep, sleep which the priest class assures them is an intimation of heaven.

Consciousness intersects with politics at the deepest place, when consciousness is the artist at work—and then all political moves and manipulations and stories disintegrate like cheap advertisements.

Disintegrate like flailing crimes of a hopeless castrated caste.

Disintegrate in a sea of life being lived.

Disintegrate in the asymmetrical tides of imagination.

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 29^th 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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

The artist within

by Jon Rappoport

May 7, 2014

www.nomorefakenews.com

“The techniques of artificial intelligence are to the mind what bureaucracy is to human social interaction.” Terry Winograd

The employees of a major corporation, Systems X Unlimited, have just been informed of a major change: one of their middle managers is now going to be an AI. An android.

He is called Mike. He’s a programmed entity from top to bottom. A non-human lookalike.

Surprisingly, the employees fall into line immediately.

They all agree that Mike’s a “good guy.” Mike shows up on time, he talks like real person, he issues orders, he listens to their problems, he occasionally takes long breaks, he does pretty much everything Bob, their former (human) boss, did.

After a year, the people in personnel come to the office and interview Mike’s underlings. When they ask the key question, “How do you like working for a boss who isn’t a person at all but instead is a pure machine?”, they shrug and stare off into the middle distance, as if the query is meaningless…

One night, Mike is wandering alone in the office picking through waste bins—his favorite pastime, off-hours—and he comes across a wrinkled piece of gray paper. He separates it from a wad of chewing gum, unfolds it, and reads the text:

“The artist within is not a creature of habit. He offloads what is already known and understood, because he wants to reach farther.

“Yes, he may build on what he already knows, but this is just the starting point. Soon, he moves across the threshold of the knight errant, and he enters the non-system.

“Others mock him and call him crazy, but: they too want to make the journey. They are aching to find the New, because boredom is driving them crazy. That is their central problem, no matter what they say and claim.

“They are trying to be smug and self-satisfied. They are trying to be oh so normal. They are trying to be “rational” to the bitter end. They are trying to be something that is slowly strangling them.

“But they will never admit it.

“Most of all, they will avoid the impulse to create. Creating is their greatest fear. Because they sense they will have to get rid of their pose. They will have to go beyond systems, which compose their armor.

“They will have to make a leap. They will have to put something new into the world and defend it against the people they know all too well: critics.

“The artist who has already made the leap acknowledges that his core is imagination. He lives through and by it. He doesn’t retreat to the average. He doesn’t give up and strive to become a happy machine. He doesn’t allow the world to dictate to him. He doesn’t sedate himself.

“He doesn’t fall back on so-called spiritual systems and their slogans and palliatives. He doesn’t build false gods and pretend they already exist. He doesn’t engage in the daily practice of asking someone or something to save him.

“He doesn’t think of his life as an exercise in solving problems. He sees through many lies, but that is just the beginning of his work.

“He wants new and startling realities, and he makes them. He doesn’t wait for them to appear.

“He doesn’t wait for some ‘superior entity’ to tell him what to do.”

Mike, the android middle manager, reads these words and is thrown back in his chair. He doesn’t understand…but something foreign and dangerous is leaking through to him.

He puts in a call to his repair consultant, Ollie, at home.

Ollie is watching CSI reruns and eating pizza. He picks up the call, and Mike says:

“I have a bleed-in.”

“Hold on,” Ollie says. He punches a code on his phone and beams Mike a set of systems-check commands.

A minute later, a holo takes shape in space between Ollie and his TV set. He examines it.

“Yes, Mike,” Ollie says, “an alien substrate of thought got into your central simulator. I’ll remove it.”

“Wait,” Mike says. “I want to know what it means.”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” Ollie says. “It’s just a distraction.”

“Then why am I worried,” Mike says.

“Because we built you to experience that feeling whenever an intrusion occurs. It tips us to a problem.”

Pause.

“I see,” Mike says. “So it’s not a threat.”

“Of course not,” Ollie says. “There are no threats. You function within established parameters.”

Ollie picks up a wand next to the pizza box and uses it to carve away the new substrate from the holo of Mike’s central simulator.

“Feel better now?” Ollie says.

“Not really,” Mike says.

Ollie sighs, stands up, and walks over to his computer. He opens a page of code, searches for Repair Section 6-A, and relays three lines to Mike.

“How about that?” Ollie says.

“Yes,” Mike says. “You want me to report to manufacturing. That’s good. Home base. What will they do?”

“Institute a deeper search pattern, root out the shadows and reboot you. Takes about an hour.”

“Then I’m back to work?”

“No. They’ll bump you over to R&D for investigation. They’re interested in checking out lingering after-effects of intrusions. Then they’ll reassign you.”

“Okay,” Mike says.

The next morning at the office, there’s a new Mike in place.

One of his assistants notices his hair is slightly lighter.

“Did you get a dye-job, boss?” she says.

“No,” the new Mike says. “I swam in the pool. The chlorine must have bleached it a little.”

She nods and goes to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.

For the next six weeks, NSA, who has been alerted to the momentary Mike glitch, keys in a Level 4 surveillance operation on all the people in Mike’s section.

The results reveal no distraction has occurred. The Essential Flow remains undisturbed.

Business as usual.

As for the old Mike, the first one, a year later he is running for a seat in the State Senate in Ohio. On his website, Mike Is Good For America, he writes:

“A campaign for the Presidency some day is a possibility. Like many Americans who have been downgraded and cast aside, I’m on my way back. I’m with the common people. I’m one of them. Our day is coming. We can imagine and create our own future…”

Back in the offices of Systems X Unlimited, an employee notices the striking resemblance of this Senate candidate to her own boss, Mike 2. She shrugs it off. Many people look alike these days. It’s some sort of genetic trend.

She shows a picture of Mike 1 to Mike 2. He says, “I bet his favorite ice cream isn’t cherry-vanilla-pecan-peach. He and I couldn’t be the same. Not completely.”

She giggles.

She likes her job. Work is fun.

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 29^th 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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

by Jon Rappoport

February 15, 2014

(To join our email list, click here.)

On May 29, 1913, in the Theatre des Champs-Elysees in Paris, a riot broke out.

After the curtain went up on the premiere of The Rite of Spring, it took only a few minutes for the tumult to begin.

Boos, hisses, catcalls, people throwing objects at the stage… The roar of the crowd quickly became so loud, the dancers lost their cues.

And the music. It was a whisper, a pounding scream, sheets of brass, harsh relentless rhythms breaking against one another, cliffs suddenly colliding and collapsing in the air.

The police arrived and shut the program down.

Stravinsky, at 28, had arrived on the world scene.

Never again would he compose music so challenging. Later in his life, after he had taken up a position as a champion of new classicism, he would conduct a recording of the Rite that was modulated to a bare shadow of its former self.

But the revolution had happened.

Much has been written about the premiere and the Rite. A great deal of programmatic explanation has been offered to “make sense” out of the piece of music: after all, it was a ballet with a plot, and the themes had to do with primitive ritual sacrifices in a fanciful pagan world.

You can also find scholarly work on the structure of the Rite, indicating a possible borrowed background of several Eastern European folk melodies.

Formidable creations of imagination are often diluted by referring the audience to other works and periods of time and influences—to explain the incomprehensible.

But the fact is, to absorb a work of imagination, one has to use his own imagination.

Since this is considered unlikely, pundits earnestly help us with step-down contexts, so that we can understand the work in pedestrian terms. In other words, so we can reduce it to nothing.

Fundamentally, it is its own world. It immediately and finally presents itself as a universe apart from easy references and tie-ins and links.

So when you listen to the Rite, you are, gratefully, alone with the music. In this regard, I recommend one recording. The 1958 Leonard Bernstein-New York Philharmonic, available as Sony SMK 47629. It’s the 1992 Bernstein Royal Edition. Le Sacre Du Printemps.

Bernstein, one of the geniuses of the 20th century, was no stranger to encountering imagination with imagination. And yet, as the conductor, he had no need to distort the score. If anything, he was more faithful to it and the composer’s great intent than any other conductor, past or present.

In 1912 and 1913, Stravinsky had composed the Rite in a reckless frame of mind. This did not mean he abandoned all he knew; it meant he wanted to show everyone how dim the perception of music had become. “To hell with all of them.”

He took the large orchestra and shredded the conventional relationships between its various sections. Instead, he made it an ocean in a storm. He crossed all lines. He crashed together old sounds and new sounds. He destroyed pleasant mesmerizing rhythms.

But there was nothing primitive about his undertaking. He made something new, something no one could have predicted.

As you listen to it, you may find one part of your mind repeating, this is not music, this is not music. Just keep listening. Five times, 50 times, 100 times.

There are artists like Stravinsky, like the Spanish architect Gaudi, like Edgar Varese, like the often-reviled American writer Henry Miller, like Walt Whitman (although Whitman has been grotesquely co-opted into a Norman Rockwell-like prefect), like the several great Mexican muralists—all of whom transmit an oceanic quality.

As in, The Flood.

There is a fear that, if such artists were unleashed to produce their work on a grand scale—and if the societal chains of perception were removed—they would take over the world.

This is the real reason there was a riot at the Theatre des Champs Elysees on May 29, 1913. Even though Stravinsky was presenting a universe of his own making, people instinctively felt that the music could spill over into the streets of Paris…and after that, where would it go? What would stop it?

Their fear was justified.

Our world, contrary to all consensus, is meant to be revolutionized by art, by imagination, right down to its core.

That this has not happened for the best is no sign that the process is irrelevant. It is only a testament to the collective resistance.

Who knows how many such revolutions have been shunted aside and rejected, in favor of the shape we now think of as central and eternal?

We are living in a default structure, the one that has been left over after all the prior revolutions have been put to sleep.

And still, it takes imagination and creating to give us what we have now. But often it is a harnessed imagination that accedes to a stolid esthetic that replaces daring and vast improvisation with classical forms and formats, long after their time.

We peek between the fluted columns to see what the future might hold. We speculate, for example, that information itself might be alive and might flow in from our own DNA to bring about a new cyber-brain step in evolution. Information? What further evidence do we need that our society is heading down a slope to the swamp?

If Rite of Spring and other works of that magnitude are information, a wooden duck on a doily is Shakespeare.

Mere information is the wood scrapings and the stone chips Brancusi swept up in his studio and put out in the alley. Information is the dried flattened tubes of paint Matisse disposed of with the old newspapers. Information is the heap of wires Tesla tossed in the garbage.

Information is the neutral boil-down left over after the artist has made his mark.

Creation is not neutral.

It flows out into the atmosphere with all its subjective force.

That is what happened on May 29, 1913.

And that is what evoked the mass fear.

The critics would have declared Salvador Dali a lunatic if he hadn’t had such formidable classical painting skills.

He placed his repeating images (the notorious melting watch, the face and body of his wife, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any familiar object.

This was quite troubling to many people. If an immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book (on the same canvas), where were all the accoutrements and assurances of modern comfortable living?

Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?

Where was a protective class structure that depended on nothing more than money and cultural slogans?

Dali invented vast comedies on canvas. But the overall joke turned, as the viewer’s eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing interlude of music, a memory of something that had never happened, a gang of genies coming out of corked bottles. A bewildering mix of attitudes sprang out from the paintings.

What was the man doing? Was he making fun of the audience? Was he simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?

Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.

But they didn’t fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work. However, his explications were handed out in a way that made it plain he was telling tall tales—interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall tales.

Every interview and press conference he gave, gave birth to more attacks on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying with the press like some perverse Olympian?

Critics flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.

It comes back to this: when you invent something truly novel, you know that you are going to stir the forces trapped within others that aspire to do the very same thing. You know that others are going to begin by denying that anything truly NEW even exists. That DOES make it a comedy, whether you want to admit it or not.

It is possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive (and contradictory) persona.

Commentators who try to take on Dali’s life usually center on the early death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali’s “basic confusion”—which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.

However, these days, with good reason, we might more correctly say that Dali was playing the media game on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)—some fiction was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.

He was creating a self that matched his paintings.

It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.

But of course Dali’s work was not about realism.

The most complex paintings—see, for example, Christopher Columbus Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador—brilliantly orchestrated the interpenetration of various solidities/ realities, more or less occupying the same space.

I’m sure that if Dali were living today, he would execute a brain-bending UFO landing on the front lawn of the White House. Such a painting would envelop the viewer with simultaneous dimensions colliding outside the president’s mansion.

At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what he could assemble in the same space—and there was no limit to the number of spaces he could corral into the same canvas. A painting could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.

Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They are offended at Dali’s skill, which matches the best work of the meticulous Dutch Renaissance masters.

They hate the dissonance. They resent Dali’s mordant wit and rankle at the idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes in such fierce extended detail.

But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a painter turn reality upside down so blatantly, while rubbing their faces in it.

The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was unfair. The scholars were “devoted to the truth.” The painter was free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.

Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, “You people are like me. We’re all doing fiction. I’m much better at it. In the process, I get at a much deeper truth.”

Dali was the hallucinogenic toreador. He was holding off and skirting the charges of the critics and the historians. They rushed at him. He moved with his cape—and danced out of the way.

The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one recognizable caricature forever, must be IDed, must have one basic function. Must—as a civilization goes down the trail of decline—be watched and taped and profiled.

When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the same time, the Order trembles.

This is not acceptable.

(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.

This rule (“being the only thing you are”) guarantees that human beings will resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one continuum of space and time. One. Only one. Forever. The biggest joke of all. The big lie.

Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.

He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers, improvised like odd-shaped and meticulous reveries.

He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.

How harsh for conventional critics to discover that nothing in Dali’s education produced an explanation for his ability to render an object so perfectly on the canvas. It was almost as if, deciding that he would present competing circumstances inside one painting, he perversely ENABLED himself to do the job with such exacting skill, “making subversive photographs come to life.”

That was too much.

But there the paintings are.

Imagination realized.

Like it or not, Dali paved the way for many others. He opened doors and windows.

And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major institutions (organized religion, psychology, education, government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals the prison break in progress.

More people understand that the veil is not really a veil of tears. It’s a curtain madly drawn across the creative force.

The pot is boiling. People want out.

Somewhere along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative power. That is the first great day. That’s the dawn of no coerced boundaries. Everything we’ve been taught tells us that a life lived entirely from creative power is impossible. We don’t have it within us. We should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater official power and wisdom. We must abide by the rules. We must, at best, “surrender to the universe.”

But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is us? Is simply one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition we installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out of reach? What if it turns out that we are the perverse ones and Dali is quite normal?

What if we pop out of the fences of this culture and this continuum and this tired movie called planet Earth?

Jon Rappoport

The author of two explosive collections, THE MATRIX REVEALED and EXIT FROM THE MATRIX, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th 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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com

Salvador Dali versus The Matrix

by Jon Rappoport

January 12, 2013

www.nomorefakenews.com

The critics would have declared Dali a mental patient if he hadn’t had such formidable classical painting skills.

He placed his repeating images (the notorious melting watch, the face and body of his wife, the ornate and fierce skeletal structures of unknown creatures) on the canvas as if they had as much right to be there as any familiar object.

This was quite troubling to many people. If an immense jawbone that was also a rib or a forked femur could rival a perfectly rendered lamp or couch or book (on the same canvas), where were all the safe and easy accoutrements and assurances of modern comfortable living?

Where was the pleasantly mesmerizing effect of a predictable existence?

Where was a protective class structure?

To make it worse, Dali invented vast comedies. But the overall joke turned, as the viewer’s eye moved, into a nightmare, into an entrancing interlude of music, a memory of something that had never happened, a gang of genies coming out of corked bottles.

What was the man doing? Was he making fun of the audience? Was he simply showing off? Was he inventing waking dreams? Was he, God forbid, actually imagining something entirely new that resisted classification?

Dali’s greatest paintings were undeniable symphonies, and mere acknowledgment of his talent would not explain how he composed the movements.

Words failed viewers and critics and colleagues and enemies.

But they didn’t fail Dali. He took every occasion to explain his work. However, his explications were handed out in a way that made it plain he was telling tall tales—interesting, hilarious, and preposterous tall tales.

Every interview and press conference he gave, gave birth to more attacks on him. Was he inviting scorn? Was he really above it all? Was he toying with the press like some perverse Olympian?

Media analysts flocked to make him persona non grata, but what was the persona they were exiling? They had no idea then, and they have no idea now.

It comes back to this: when you invent something truly novel, you know that you are going to stir the forces trapped within others that aspire to do the very same thing. You know that others are going to begin by denying that anything truly NEW even exists. That DOES make it a comedy, whether you want to admit it or not.

It is possible that every statement ever uttered in public by Dali was a lie. A fabrication. An invention dedicated to constructing a massive (and contradictory) persona.

Commentators who try to take on Dali’s life usually center on the early death of his young brother as the core explanation for Dali’s “basic confusion”—which resulted in his bizarre approach to his own fame.

However, these days, with good reason, we might more correctly say that Dali was playing the media game on his own terms, after realizing that no reporter wanted the real Dali (whatever that might mean)—some fiction was being asked for, and the artist was merely being accommodating.

He was creating a self that matched his paintings.

It is generally acknowledged that no artist of the 20th century was superior to Dali in the ability to render realistic detail.

But of course Dali’s work was not about realism.

The most complex paintings—see, for example, Christopher Columbus Discovering America and The Hallucinogenic Toreador—brilliantly orchestrated the interpenetration of various solidities of realities, more or less occupying the same space.

I’m sure that if Dali were living today, he would execute a brain-bending UFO landing on the front lawn of the White House. Such a painting would envelop the viewer with several simultaneous dimensions colliding outside the president’s mansion.

At some point in his career, Dali saw (decided) there was no limit to what he could assemble in the same space—and there was no limit to the number of spaces he could corral on the same canvas. A painting could become a science-fiction novel reaching into several pasts and futures. The protagonist (the viewer) could find himself in such a simultaneity.

Critics have attacked the paintings relentlessly. They hate the dissonance. It’s a sign that Dali could give full play to his imagination—a sin of the first order. They resent Dali’s mordant wit, and rankle at the idea that Dali could carry out monstrous jokes—in such fierce extended detail—on any given canvas.

But above all, the sheer imagination harpoons the critics. How dare a painter turn reality upside down so blatantly, while rubbing their faces in the detail.

The cherry on the cake was: for every attack the critics launched at Dali the man (they really had no idea who he was), Dali would come back at them with yet another elaborate piece of fiction about himself. It was unfair. The critics were “devoted to the truth.” The painter was free to invent himself over and over as many times as he fancied.

Dali was holding up a mirror. He was saying, “You people are like me. We’re all doing fiction. I’m much better at it. In the process, I get at a much deeper truth.”

Dali was the hallucinogenic toreador. He was holding off and skirting the charges of the critics and the historians. They rushed at him. He moved with his cape—and danced out of the way.

The principles of organized society dictate that a person must be who he is, even if that is a cartoon of a cartoon. A person must be one recognizable caricature forever, must be IDed, must have one basic function. Must—as a civilization goes down the trail of decline—be watched and taped and profiled.

When a person shows up who is many different things, who can invent himself at the drop of hat, who seems to stand in 14 different places at the same time, the Order trembles.

This is not acceptable.

(Fake) reality declares: what you said yesterday must synchronize absolutely with what you say today.

This rule (“being the only thing you are”) guarantees that human beings will resonate with the premise that we all live and think and work in one continuum of space and time. One. Only one. Forever.

That’s the biggest joke of all. The big lie.

Whatever he was, however despicable he may have been in certain respects, Dali broke that egg. Broke the cardinal rule.

He reveled in doing it. He made people wait for an answer about himself, and the answer never came. Instead, he gave them a hundred answers, improvised like odd-shaped and meticulous reveries.

He threw people back on their own resources, and those resources proved to be severely limited.

How harsh for conventional critics to discover that nothing in Dali’s education produced an explanation for his ability to render an object so perfectly on the canvas. It was almost as if, deciding that he would present competing circumstances inside one painting, he perversely ENABLED himself to do the job with such exacting skill, “making subversive photographs come to life.”

That was too much.

But there the paintings are.

Imagination realized.

Suck on that lemon.

Like it or not, Dali paved the way for many others. He opened doors and windows.

And the pressure has been building. The growing failure of major institutions (organized religion, psychology, education, government) to keep the cork in the bottle signals a prison break in progress.

More people understand that the veil is not really a veil of tears. It’s a curtain madly drawn across the creative force.

The pot is boiling. People want out.

Somewhere along the line we have to give the green light to our own creative power. That is the first great day. That’s the dawn of no coerced boundaries. Everything we’ve been taught tells us that a life lived entirely from creative power is impossible. It’s weird. It’s crazy. It’s meaningless. We don’t have it within us. We should maintain silence and propriety in the face of greater official power and wisdom. We must abide by the rules. We must, at best, “surrender to the universe.”

But what if, when we come around the far turn, we see that the universe is us? Is simply one part of imagination? Is a twinkling rendition installed to keep us titillated with dreams that would forever drift out of reach?

Twenty years ago, I had a conversation with Jack True that touched on Dali. Jack was, in my estimation, the most innovative and gifted hypnotherapist on the planet. He was constantly inventing ways to wake people up from what he called “their core trance.”

Here is a fragment from that conversation.

Q: You wanted to say something about Dali?

A: Just that I admire him for his conviction.

Q: His conviction about what?

A: The creative act. To have executed all those paintings with as much detail—-and at the same time to bring into being situations that never existed before, there on the canvas—he shook up the world. He really did. And he satisfied all the conditions for the “common man.”

Q: What does that mean?

A: The “common man” wants his art to “look real.” Well, Dali gave the common man that in spades. To a T. Except what looked perfectly real was perfectly wild, way beyond the rules of time and space. That’s what shook up the world. Dali was working with grand gestures in grand multiple spaces.

Space really is the issue. To give the viewer the feeling that space can extend in enormous ways and impart a sense of high passion, as opposed to dead territory…Dali worked with exceedingly high intensity. And he wasn’t asking for acceptance. He was ramming his vision down the throats of the public. He was turning the screw.

Q: You think he had a major effect on the consciousness of the planet.

A: People were forced to re-think assumptions. They were forced to admit that there might be some very fantastic things floating around in their own consciousness. They may have hated Dali’s work, but they had to feel that their own minds and imaginations were much bigger than they supposed.

Q: So who was Dali?

A: Only he knows that. He was a very slippery fellow in public. He thought of every public appearance as a stage play, and he was the star. He changed roles all the time. And he did that while pretending that he was a model of consistency. Everything he did was against the grain.

Q: He took delight in exploding conventional notions of physics.

A: I think he believed that every particle of matter was a separate dream.

Q: That’s an interesting statement.

A: He knew that matter and energy were born out of dreams, visions, that they were products of imagination. This gave him enormous leverage.

Q: In his various portrayals of himself, there was a common thread. He presented himself as a kind of magician.

A: He liked to present himself as a Svengali.

Q: He gave many people the idea that someone who relies on his imagination is weird.

A: Well, you can’t avoid that. People will always think that way, even if you wear a three-piece suit.

Q: Why is there such a fear of imagination?

A: Because people know they have it and they also know they don’t use it. So they feel guilt. And that translates into fear and resentment, which are central parts of life on planet Earth.

JACK TRUE, the most creative hypnotherapist on the face of the planet, is featured in THE MATRIX REVEALED. Jack’s anti-Matrix understanding of the mind and how to liberate it is unparalleled. His insights are unique, staggering. 43 interviews, 320 pages. That is just a faction of what THE MATRIX REVEALED has to offer.

Jon Rappoport

The author of an explosive collection, THE MATRIX REVEALED, Jon was a candidate for a US Congressional seat in the 29^th District of California. 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 emails at www.nomorefakenews.com