Bound By Magic

Whether or not one believes in the supernatural or paranormal aspects of magic, there is no doubt that magic is, in the words of Daniel O’Keefe, "real social action". If there is one aspect of magic that has always fascinated the social scientists that study it, it is the phenomenon of voodoo death. In the first half of the twentieth century, it became an object of almost obsessive study by the group of French sociologists of the Durkheim school, and the British anthropologists that were led by Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. Whereas mana theory showed that human interaction can be deeply nourishing, perhaps even necessary for human health, voodoo death, which is a real phenomenon that has been observed on countless occasions, shows that human interaction can be toxic in and of itself.

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of voodoo death is the rapidity with which it takes effect. When a member of a primitive tribe has the smouldering branch or chicken bone pointed at him by the witch doctor, the tribesman will die usually within a fortnight, and often within a couple of days. Ultimately, voodoo death is socially induced death - the man has been found breaking a tribal taboo, and the witch doctor condemns him to death on behalf of the rest of the tribe. Although the actual physical cause of death is still somewhat a mystery, the psychological mechanism of death is an attack by the super-ego, the component of the mind that Freud identified as ideally containing the parental and societal influences needed to compel the ego into controlling the unruly urgings of the id. In reality, the super-ego often works as what Christopher Lasch called "society’s agent in the mind", and this is especially so in modern societies where parental authority has given way to dissipated bureaucratic and corporate structures whose exigencies are disparate and often contradictory. In such circumstances, the super-ego, rather than functioning as the severe but measured moderator we know as "conscience", often takes a harsh and punitive form.

Mostly nowadays we individually experience the super-ego as a minor but persistent nuisance. It’s the voice in our heads that tells us we’re bad if we haven’t done an important task, or done it to a lower standard than we know we’re capable of. It also likes to throw up embarrassing or guilty memories, forcing to us to close our eyes and curse in order to send them away. The phrase "I could die from embarrassment" contains more than a germ of truth - the super-ego that punishes us for social misdemeanors is perfectly capable of killing us (or encouraging us to kill ourselves) under the right circumstances.

The politics of class are probably the area of greatest concentration of magic in modern society. Ultimately it can be said that class is magic. Perhaps the most urgent purpose of any ruling class is to cast binding spells on the lower orders, to force super-ego pressure downwards on those below. I would speculate that one sure definition of class is that the lower down the class structure you are, the more thoroughly you are bound by limiting magic, by the more firmly you have convinced yourself of what you are capable and incapable of doing. Ruling class magic is enhanced in its power by a number of tricks and props, the most important being:

* The symbolism and arcana of authority

* A clear, portentous, priestly manner of speaking, involving the incantatory repetition of key phrases ("there is no alternative", "we’re all in this together" etc.)

* Euphemistic and obfuscatory in-group terminology, expressly designed to preserve the magic of authority from coming under detailed scrutiny.

* Terrifyingly convoluted etiquette intended to focus enormous super-ego pressure on the uninitiated

Margaret Thatcher was particularly masterful at the rites of ruling class magic. Her haughty tones, so redolent of the priest (that modern descendent of the witchdoctor) always make me think that she should have started her speeches with the phrase "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today…". Her mastery of this kind of performance is probably the basis of her reputation for competence, which her short-sighted economic programme would belie.



For all the ramifications of economic relations, it is important to note that the class system is ultimately maintained by magical ritual and symbolism, by what Wittgenstein called an "agreement to agree". Essentially we all agree to agree which class we belong to, and to the social relations that result from membership of that class. Whatever privileges or cultural cringes we inherit from this agreement we accept ontologically, as "natural facts". Ultimately however, for all its pretense of sophistication, this is really an old compact that goes far, far back into the primitive realms of witchdoctor-magic, from which contemporary magic is descended, and which has evolved far less than most of us would like to believe.

Fail Again, Fail Better

Anyone with an interest in the 70s will no doubt find themselves obliged to read books on the era. At the moment there’s a glut of them, the most recent and heftiest being Dominic Sandbrook’s “State of Emergency” which focuses on but two years (at woeful length) and largely seems to be an attempt to justify the ways of Heath to man or perhaps even less nobly, restore the reputation of Enoch Powell on the basis that he was a monetarist prophet without honour and therefore an unacknowledged force-for-good. Enoch must be alright, he paved the way for Thatcherism!

Effectively “State” feels like a synthesis of two vastly superior books on the seventies Alwyn Turner's “Crisis, What Crisis?” and Andy Beckett’s “When the lights went out”. It probably feels like this because that’s exactly what it is. Reading the three books in rapid succession it will strike home quite forcefully just how derivative of the other two author’s work Sandbrook’s is. Turner gets the occasional nod in the main body of Sandbrook’s book but he has the audacity not only to plagiarise Beckett but then suggest that Beckett’s take on the Seventies as a time “when the lights went out” is the kind of clichéd conventional wisdom about the Seventies that should be overturned.

If he’s getting it wrong stop nicking his stuff then you cheeky cunt! Is the obvious response, which as a humble blogger, I can make with impunity.

So the message is effectively I’d dodge that Sandbrook book if I were you. I mean not just because he’s a Tory, or because he’s obviously a lazy, plagiarising careerist but because it doesn’t give you anything you can’t get elsewhere. Were you to read “When the lights…” which stays away from popular culture but digs deep into the lost possibilities of the Seventies, “Crisis..” which takes on the popular culture of the time very broadly and John Savage’s “England’s Dreaming” which is exhaustive on the counter culture, you’d have a pretty comprehensive road map of the times.

AHHH. Yeah. I love blogger impunity. Sandbrook, you’re wasting my time and money you thieving, lazy, Tory dullard! Will I be reading the second volume? Ho-ho! Whadayathink?


An additional and important contrast between Beckett’s and Sandbrook’s books, and one that makes his “correction” of Beckett even more grating, is that hoary old trope about Making History Come Alive. Sandbrook’s Seventies are a tedious museum piece compared to Beckett’s for a number of reasons, firstly because the Seventies seem to be important enough to Beckett for him to get out and do a bit of wandering around and wondering aloud, interviewing key people and asking pointed questions about the nature of and direction of the time, whereas with Sandbrook’s book you feel he’s basically racing against a deadline cutting and pasting other people’s work in furiously. There seems to have been a deep investment of time and thought in one, a sense that the Seventies matters and matters on a personal level as opposed to a maniacal, impersonal ploughing on through the post war decades ( Sandbrook’s already done the Fifties and Sixties) to keep your publisher happy on the other.

Secondly and most significantly, what’s both haunting and Hauntological about Beckett’s book, and the real sense in which it makes history “come alive” is its own aliveness to and quiet insistence on the possibility that it may all have gone some other way. Beckett’s book isn’t a “counterfactual” in the normal sense but it invites the reader into all kinds of speculations and reflections on alternate paths out of the Seventies: dusty inevitabilities are broken open into moments seething with latent possibility and as a result the text itself is ghosted by a whole series of alternate and parallel histories. In this sense Beckett’s work is packed with political energy, is “inspirational” not because it’s directly polemical but because it enlists the reader’s imagination, because it believes that there was and always is an alternative and that history is shaped both by chance and by the judgment and commitment of social agents at all levels. It’s a superb work of anti-Realism in other words, and as such, irrespective of the fact that it’s a book on the Seventies it is certainly a key book of our increasingly fractious times.

We need facts!

Interesting the amount of mileage they get out of the idea that even The Queen will have to complete a census form (I expect the Queen Mum filled it out with a betting shop pen) but then these were the days when the Royal Family still had a totemistic, cap touching appeal to the majority of the public who watched the telly.

I'd like to see the results of the work of the army with light blue satchels when it's finally made public but, sadly, I'll be dead. What I do know is that 2 year 11 month old Paul lived at 79 St Andrews Avenue, Colchester, Essex with his bricklayer father, Keith (25) and his factory worker mother, Vicky (23).

By Unmann-Wittering.

Synchronicity

Although the Seventies saw the rise of J.G. Ballard as the bête noire of British fiction, they also saw a revival in the fortunes of a previous enfant terrible of the literary world. Colin Wilson, a working-class autodidact from Leicester, had risen meteorically in the 1950’s as the author of "The Outsider", a biographical examination of the visionary impulse within Western art, and had fallen just as quickly, as a series of highly public sexual escapades and a realisation that some of his ideas were deeply idiosyncratic saw him being dropped by the gatekeepers of Hampstead literary life like a hot pentacle.

Wilson’s response to personal and professional ridicule throughout the 1960’s was to release a torrent of work, both factual and fictional, encompassing biography, philosophy, detective fiction and science fiction. Voluminously well-read, he enlisted the ideas of such varied thinkers as Bergson, Nietzsche, Husserl, Jung and Abraham Maslow to support his central idea; a kind of anti-existentialism that posited that reality is what we experience in "peak moments" of involuntary visionary wonder, rather than the listless banality that we experience in our daily lives. Although this idea has a long history in Eastern mysticism and Christian esotericism, Wilson went further in speculating that the task of human consciousness was not to mediate and interpret reality, but to narrow and compress it, to block out rather than gather in.


Following the social ructions at the end of the 1960’s, the Seventies, perhaps not coincidentally, saw an explosion of what we would now call Fortean phenomena: UFO sightings and abductions, poltergeist hauntings, appearances of Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. In 1971, Wilson published "The Occult", which fortuitously coincided with this deluge of psychic arcana, and revived interest in his work, but perhaps the strangest and most perplexing adventure he became involved in was documented in the book he co-authored with "cryptozoologist" Ted Holiday, "The Goblin Universe".

Holiday was convinced that the Loch Ness Monster, along with other denizens of what he called "the phantom menagerie" such as the Yeti, the mystery big cats of the English home counties and extra-terrestrials, were not real creatures, but what he called "thoughtforms" - manifestations of the human collective unconscious that have a tendency to form when certain highly charged locations are visited by highly sensitive individuals. Holiday, who claimed to have seen Nessie on several occasions, regarded these manifestations as being irretrievably evil, the product of the more grotesque aspect of whatever unknown power organises the universe.

In 1973, in what Wilson considered to be a dangerously reckless move, Holiday enlisted a Presbyterian priest by the name of Donald Omand to accompany him out onto the water to exorcise the loch. Although the exorcism passed off without apparent incident, within a few days Holiday and his accomplices were to encounter a bewildering array of bizarre phenomena, including mysterious flashing lights, and sudden tornados that would shake the walls of their homes before abating in seconds. Holiday himself would come across one of the notorious "men in black" while attempting to investigate an alleged UFO landing site. It was to be a fateful meeting - he would suffer a heart attack at exactly the same spot a year later. As a keen student of Jung, he himself would observe: "Synchonicity and the forces that control it never give up".

In an unusual postscript, in 1983 The Police would record this song, which would seem to have a curious resonance with Holiday’s account. Any literal connection would be impossible though - Holiday completed his manuscript just before his death from a second heart attack in 1979, and the book itself wasn’t published until 1986, meaning that at the time the song was written no-one other than Holiday’s mother and Wilson would have known his full story.

The Humour Market

Some of you were barely alive in the 1970s.

Some of you would have been in nappies, and in nappies in the late Seventies.

Speaking as someone who turned seven half way through 1970, let me tell you what the British Seventies were really about.

Comedy!

Pretty much every decade since the Seventies, there's been this whole "comedy's the new rock'n'roll" palaver. But in the Seventies, comedy really did give rock'n'roll a close run for its money.

Monty Python's Flying Circus was like the Beatles.

It spawned an entire industry of spin-offs, cash-ins, solo careers, imitations.

There were books.










Paralleling the boom in TV comedy books was a thriving market for collections by humorists and satirists, many of them spinning off Punch magazine (which I bought every week between the ages of 10 and 12).





Disappointed not to be able to find an image for Willie Rushton's Super Pig, his guide for male chauvinists spoof on a pop-feminist best-seller of the era called SuperWoman.

Then there was Private Eye's micro-industry of books...

American humor books is a whole other area I'm not qualified to comment on





Books of cartoons, that's a separate topic really. Giles's annual collection distended Christmas stockings across the nation, but he's not a particularly 1970s figure, although you can imagine the conflicts, crises, foibles and national humiliations of the day provided plenty of fodder for him.




Back to British comedy: the big TV series spun off records. Just as me and my brothers aquired all the Python-related books, Python-spin-off-related books, and Python-imitator-related books (i.e. Goodies) at the top of this post,so too did we own all of the following:







I didn't own the following ground-breakingly obscene platters, but a few years after they came out, I had friends who'd got hold of them, sometimes through their older brothers.





The whole realm of records made by the big up stand-up comics of the time, vaguely edgy seeming and coming out of folk clubs in some cases--Billy Connolly, Jasper Carrot--was not something I was into particularly.

And then there was National Lampoon. Mostly known in the UK for the frat-boy retro-comedy Animal House and perhaps for the winsome and innocuous Vacation movies starring Chevy Chase, this was a satirical magazine initially (some of the people involved went on to do Spinal Tap), that quickly spun off into records and stage shows (some of the people involved went on to Saturday Night Live). For all I know there were National Lampoon related books too.

As a teenager I managed to track down a single issue of the magazine, in some kind of specialist store in London.

But this album wound up in the local record store in Berkhamsted. My brother bought it in a sale they had of records damaged in a flood. I can almost picture the stain on the cover, the ripples in the cardboard caused by its drying out.



This one came out of a stage show, a satire of Woodstock and the squalor of rock festivals. I recently picked it up for $2 but I have yet to play it.



But American comedy records, that's a whole other mega-zone in itself that I'm not equipped to discuss. There's people who talk about the life-changing impact of Richard Pryor's albums for instance.

Of course comedy records existed before the Seventies... My parents had records by Tom Lehrer (singing what for their time were blackly humorous songs) and Pete Sellers (Songs For Swingin' Sellers, produced by George Martin I believe), as well as a couple of episodes of Hancock's Half Hour in vinyl form. There were recordings of the The Goon Show , albums of Woody Allen doing stand-up, etc etc

Still, as I recall comedy LPs were a big part of Seventies British adolescence.

An obvious point to make is that before the age of the VCR and video rental stores, the only way to get a permanent and replayable document of your fave cult comedy show was to buy the records. Most of the early Python records consisted not of new material but of the most beloved sketches from the TV show, rerecorded in the studio, without the interruption of studio audience laughter, which drowned out some of the best lines. Replayable is the key point: you listened over and over, until you knew every line and every inflection by heart.