And then, a kind of regression of imagination, back to lore, and religious imagery, a scene as if out of a geophysical horror movie, Abaddon rises up (and note recent discovery of an angel that rises up in the raw brain),
my pictor perhaps a bit to pinaxy
And The Angel of the Bottomless Pit, And His Name in Hebrew is Abaddon, Altered States, 1978, 66, May 20m 2023.
Then, PC further descends into the science, aliquot is good,
and for Jessup and others, and this tone was taken in the movie too, a girl is but a peyote plant wrapped around one, on the way to work
now, we have to go back. This image was said to contain limbs and faces all over it.
then, the brown blob, which is imagined as a sort of paramecium, expands, but loses its figure, just red and gold plasma,
these could serve as a line of imagery parallel to that of ectoplasm in spirit art, and movies, or relate to the figurative tradition of the naming of the plant, based on a lore not unlike that ascribed to the mandrake in the Rhineland. These pictures depict the Lophophora, which is the crest-carrying or helmet-
then, blossoming in the wild only once every thirty years, they do look extraordinarily strange, a xerophyte, which is almost in the nature of a UFO if you are not used to that climate,
and then the buttons, is what they were called in hippie culture.
and in the case of the peyote the figurative tradition is centered on the hermaphrotisim of the plant as evoked by the shape of it with its roots dug up, having both apparentt male and female human sex organs. All of this, though, with policing of the plant by shamans, tells me that the peyote is the ultimate tytchonic, powers that be, controlled plant.
But this is a wider element of figuration, an ambient figuration, come out of the visions that Jessup has. So, less like a teratoma, and more like a peripteral embrasure
thus, whilst a figuration centered in the empty place of tychonic control of vigil-hypnagogy is still controlled by the operator, the subject subject to him, and that would represent the gravitate, heavy body WITH organs of the singleton and the “normal,” this eruption of figuration out of the ambient would bee fluid, and fuzzy, and foggy, and peekabooish, appearing and disappearing, constantly in flux, no spikes, no latching on, just floating and drifting, and this is the body without organs in the context of this discussion (and likely where my body is located from birth and now from MSA).
And, I have touched upon this particular sort of figuration once before. It occurs in the work of illustrator Arthur Rackham, who liked to envison the ambient zone filled with a crowd of pareiodoliac images just hovering outside the scenery. LINK. This idea came back to me last night. And, as such, though PC rushed by it to cosmic abstraction in his telling of the first trip that Jessup had, it generates the zone of seeing monsters, or epigogy, first stage is the seeing of faces,
and the second phase is the seeing of figures in full,
this stage was largely repressed by Jessup being able to maintain some POV control over his original trip in Mexico, unlike in Russell, he iimmediately dis-figrued the progress off the form by thinking of zone of tibetan belief, and that was that. But, the thing is, it is from THIS intersection in the development of the thing that he is hit with when the aftereffects of the sensory deprivation version of the trip begins to goes bad, and, in keeping with this turning point in horror, the moment that he loses control of the situation. I am going to now, since he is in bed, start from the premise of a bed graph, so this is a visit from the MyPillow Demon, in an extreme form, but swing round to place him on the lattice position in hypnagogy, leaving it uncertain if he is in fact dreaming or awake, and likely, like what happened to me this morning between 430 and 515, not knowing if he is in between. And there are two visions here,
One, he felt like small animals were crawling all over him, this is actually three phases, one
He Awoke in a Bolt of Terror, Under the Impression that Small Animals Were Crawling all over him, Altered States, 1978, 73m May 21, 2023.
In other words, the figurative elements is derived from a physical frisson on the skin, perceived whilst asleep, but lightly, in the land of nod, and then he wakes up, to throw the covers off.
At this point, he sees that it is not animals, but, in many ways, worse, something from inside him is causing his arm to bulge out,
He Saw His Body Swelling and Contorting, Altered States, 1978, 73, May 21, 2023.
the interesting, and true to life thing here is that he feels the small animals whilst he is sleeping, and then come the ephialtic leap, he sits bolt upright in bed, thinking that the nightmare is real, but, then, while what usually happens is he sees that something like the fan was blowing on his skin, or something of that sort, discounting it, allowing him to settle down, in this case, he sees something worse, so this does have an element of Empty Pillow or Marsha Junt Syndrome, on his own pillow, invoking a loss of self, as he sees his arms swell up in bubbling ways. This is a classic animation of the inanimate and caused by the framing of the wakefulness still being dream, not shaken off, and continuing (see my treatment of my incident of this sort seeing my bedside lamp catch fire, 2021). But, then, there is a step three. One arm, for example, shrivels to look like a little furred limb, like a rat’s paw. This part was looked past in the movie, but it is a teratoma, literally!
An Arm Briefly Shriveled Into a Bent Little Furred Limb, Much Like a Rat’s Paw, Altered States, 1978, May 21, 2023.
In The Fly series, I discerned the evolution of a three-stage model of endoscopy in the seeing of monsters, that is, phases of epigogy. The straight up surgical phase, to get a look see by cutting; but, then, the new thing in the 80s, laparoscopic surgery, with micro instruments, focused on the interior of organs (the kind of surgery, a choloangiopancreatography; but, then, and the most advanced, at that time, the grafting ethos, that is, making use of idle or extra organs without function, to then put them to use to make up for organs that are failing. Considering complications along the way, a mistaken version of the grafted would be a teratoma, that is, a former twin devoured in the womb by its superior but surviving in it as a grotesque tumor with the nature of a truncated body. Jessup’s momentary vision of his hand as a rat’s paw strikes me as of that order of imagination, linking, then, the Altered States lore with the Dead Ringers lore, and The Fly. This would then also imply that there is rat’s DNA in him, that his genetic structure has been messed up. Scary.
Then, he sees that his feet become webbed, but the main center of action is that the bones in jist jaw and forehead were reassembling, AAA
A Second Later Shrank Into That of Some Curious Little Arboreal Animal, Altered States, 1978, 73, May 21, 2023
This too is a teratoma, the type of the moment, in my analysis, again meaning that somehow the arboreal animal got his DNA mixed in with Jessup’s too. And as his body is without organs and seems to be being held together by a strapping of skin it does seem to be a jess concoction of a falconing of the bones. PC declares that this little animal was eidetic, that is, vivid, as in unforgettable, seen in detail, real, not a dream image. Eidetic memory is said to occur amongst 2% of children and it may be that I tend to dwell on memories of my preteen years because of my skill at redreaming, and thus retaining in the living of them eidetic memories. I mean, simply from an incident at JH’s, the emblematic example of me playing with the girls, I remember one, two, three, four, five eidetic images (and I think in Halloween ets this is indicated by the mask POV). What this means is seeing of monsters, but also third stage eldritch, when with psychotic ability what you dream is taken for real.
And, once again, as deposited previously, he once again has a random servicing girl, the ever serving grad student of the 60s-70s cliché, when the cohort of 1930 preyed upon the 20 year olds, he has a random, marginal girl attached. She, of course, suspects nothing )compare this to Claire’s response to Bev’s nightmare in Dead Ringers). The last teratoma, the who was I in bed with that night? Phantom stage four.
Sleepily Asked Him If He Was Alright, Altered States, 1978, 73, May 21, 2023
And, indeed, as a scene in Looking For Mr Goodbar indicates, the easy sex of the 60s had in fact given way to something else, making that former regime an almost, indeed, alien form of life, and relating in it, and then too the girls that accomodated it, the Are Your Alright? Girl, and since I never once exploited a teaching position to sleep with the students I am allowed this teratoma of womanhood.
Then we go through the whole of it again in the context of a Bathroom Mirror tropaic form, a trope of deep rootage in movies, and here again,
he bathroom mirror convention, of which I have written much (I think), is complicated, as a construct. The person in front of it sees himself, but then usually if in the middle of a vector uses the mirror to inspect one close up body parts like scars or growths under the armpits, in the mouth, ears, eyes, side, etc. But there is also a tradition of gazing in to gaze through into another world, where one turns into something else. At the same time, the closing of the bathroom mirror, because of the glitch between the space it is in and the range of its reflection, always causes a start., a feeling that someone is there, and too close, or closing in, and then there is also those far off behind. It is very complicated,
this is simply PC more or less making use of the construct of the bathroom mirror in all its complicated gazes not unlike a polygraph and submitting it to an overwritten model of human evolution, all of it happening now inside Jessup, that is, Jessup as a jessum. I will leave it at this
you know, the standard map, which people actually fight over as if this has anything to do with discerning what man is now.
then, again, he sees the little arboreal creature, a femur-like delicate thing, also, no need to describe. Then since he wants to take notes PC also submits this process to the trope of automatic writing, in which case the writing hand distorts the writing because of protoplastic substance moving up through his arm out his elbow, a movement that also relates all this to the trope of ectoplasmic expulsions in Legend of Hell House and in of course The Quiet Ones too.
then he goes back into the chamber, and it follows pretty much the script of the original peyote episode in Mexico, descent into the blackness of the bottomless pit.
ad I have identified rocks floating on water or placed on a trellis or some sort as the emblem symbolic of the bottomless pit, and here we are again,
then he descends into a mural of [prehistoric time, not unlike the famous yale mural,
he is itemizing, while PC gets in some strange names only an expert would, to, in his view, expand upon the science, or nail it down, this is just itemizing,
the difference now is, though it sounds like he is reading out of a National Geographic book, is that this is no longer a hallucination, but real, that is, epigogy, take as real
and his ego is so prepossessed from a life of privilege that he has no trouble regressing to the very beginning of mankind and declaring that he has arrived at the very birth of man, forget the fact that 2020s discourse would remind him that the man who was then birthed was black, because we are always umbrellaing over past time with modern binaryism, he even claims for himself the role of protohuman, which is a reflection of his prepossessing state in his self-conception, relative to himself (that is, my theory that the ppl of power of any place or time assume that power by developing a prepopossessed sense of that power, in control of prototypical space, and thus infused with its power)
and like a scene out of 2001 space odyssey, but reformed to more current theory, he then sees protohuman himself,
Then things get really 1970s essentialism embarrassing. He is attacked by one of the protohumans, surprising him because I guess he did not think his POV brought a body along with him into protohuman time-space to be attacked, but now this protohuman attacks him and eats him. A pause. LRHubbard, and some musers in the tradition of theosophy, believed that be regression to the womb, and then erasing the engrams which keep us in this life, if you can clear through, you recede back further into an earlier life. This is a similar formulation of this belief, if you break through the integument of you, you can “transcend” (but really backbuild?) to a former self, or dissolve entirely into creation, and thus experience creation, jeez, this is right out of the Amun cult of Aknaten, unreal, primal, a power discourse. And, of course, given the mindset of the power person, who is never guilty, his transcendence comes when he gets to be the primeval Jesus and is eaten to then merge with creation and all life. My view on this belief system is that you have to have a very thick ego integument to not be threatened with dissolution or annihilation by such an occurrence. I place this, loosely, as another form of he Purple People Eater, fall out of tychonic control states.
hen when he eats a goat, and this to compare t o a scene in American Werewolf in London, all but contemporaneous, he arrives as the incarnate id.
since we are talking about another appearance of the eating impulse in psychology, I at present link this to the Purple People Eater syndrome as falls out from the Figure Eight of tyche mind control and somehow this spins down into a zone of the bottomless pit reserved only for those that fall out of power, but are still in power, in the telling of it, and thus even their auto omophagy is a privilege and a holy sacrifice upon the basis of which to flatter their egos again, it is a kind of dissolution and tearing apart, obviously, but it is not psallictive, and it is not the work of pslamx either, an angel lifted out of the bottomless pit, since Tartarus was a great bronze jug reserved specifically for demigods hurled directly out of heaven by zeus, having experienced the twenty day fall through space, this is still an exclusive zone, I will call this manifestation of the PPE Phag (fahg).
being fully aware that as a too-recent (still) immigrant, whose discourse is no longer featured in the construal of the times, and never having accrued any power, this is only a fantasy from outside in for me, without any real plausible outcome, for me, if I went through this, complete annihilation of self. (though there is some fictional whisper that sequiturs are exempt from all).
But then notice too that Jessup’s voice, as he reports it, regresses into a croak and then a click, he has lost the organ of speech, and has physically, himself, his integuments demolished, regressed into a real real real real real previous life,
And hen he steps out, but we zoom into the Tartarus precinct keeping the PPE in the bottomless pit
Nothing Came Out Except a Rasping Kind of Grunt, Altered States, 1978, 81, May 21, 2023.
That is, he cant talk, he has regressed to before humanoids had the ability to talk
I have to scirp this one too, because he is also bearded in blood, that is a nice phrase,
Jessup’s Face Was Bearded In Blood, Altered States, 1978, 81, May 21, 2023.
(In this scirpograph the sensory deprivation tank is an emblematic tychonic machine assembly, that is, a rhabdom, which controls the life of the subject, Jessup, when he comes out, he is the very personification of the Rings of Saturn, which I always pictre as blue, and he is bony and bedraggled because he spans the Luor, between waking and sleeping, to reveal his blood bearded face as the nightmare image. Other than that this is a pretty routine nightmare splat, ending up in the lattice position, hypnagogy, not in the bottomless pit.
And then when he does regain his voice, he uses the word, reconstitutes, which sets the movie off.
it is the most troubling of agencies, reverse agency, in which one can devise a counter agentic dream, and, then, somehow, make that real again. He is now claiming that he did not just go into the tank to, as with peyote, have a vision or hallucination that took him back to what looked like primeval time, he actually physically regressed and for real in real time, somehow, went back to Boston in the Pleistocene era, or at the dawn of man era, whatever, and to accommodate that process he physically, really truly regressed into that arboreal prehuman, and thus to come back out he will have to reconstitute as Jessup in 1970s Boston. In both theosophy, as I understand it from Ithell Colquhoun in the Sword of Wisdom (1975), and in scientology, externalization is seen as a form of astral or out of body experience, but which happens by way of a spirit of oneself. A sequitura would be the same sort of thing (in fiction). But this is in line with Dr Jekyll and My Hyde, he essaying that he physically regressed, so needs to reconstitute. His colleagues cannot accept this.
In the Mountain of Signs, Artaud had ten visions, which I have worked out previously. In popular culture, I was only exposed to the idea of peyotelike visions in Mexico through rhe Ken Russell movie, Altered States (1980). I have written them up before, but not since a fuller model lets me chart them out more accurately. As for the book, the relevant section begins when, in June 1975, Jessup goes to Mexico.
There is a relation by blood to the Tarahumara, though these are another tribe, but also in the barrancas of Mexico
In a perhaps fiction feint by PC it is explained that the Hinchis had drifted from their origial animaistic reliigion, except for a lingering attachment to Quetzecoatl. They had as a result developed their own code related to life-giving forces, which Jessup thinks sounds oriental
Here as elsewhere, and too often, in the book, PC resorts to explanation of the science, but we are basically talking of the mushroom, not peyote.
But what is interesting is that each of the sources are prescribed by the shaman with a specific goal in mind. This plant, for example, is the First Flower, the idea being that it specifically brings you back to your first memories, and maybe to the first memories of creation.
then, the bruja presiding, with a description of her housing which corresponds to images in some books, where Tarahumara housing takes on a ramshackle appearance for cultural reasons, there being no windows, and a concession to impermanence.
Of course, Jessup, a superessentialist, is interested in the sinicuiche, the First Flower, and what it brings you to. He asks the bruja, she says it is unborn stuff the world of the first soul. There is no problem getting to the first prototype in my basic formulations, but it is a bit contrived that he strikes gold the very first trip out. What is more likely to have happened is that he is introduced to it gradually, and then by a series of bootstrapped back buildings, comes at last to the realization of the First soul, at the bottom of creation. In formulas, easy to represent
but in my graphs, a bit more challenging. For the moment, my guess is, the First Soul has to reside in farthest out and deepest sentience, way at the far end of the Ootheca, as I term it. The problem is, how does Jessup get there? realistically speaking
That it consists of unborn stuff also relates this Soul directly to the zone of decomposition which so thrilled me in Artaud’s descriptions of the shamans descent into the evil dark hole, rimmed by a ring where babies in wombs of women who accidentally step in could decompose. This also relates to unborn fantasies of LR Hubbard, and of the modernist era of popular culture in general, using Freudianism 101.
Then, the shaman tells him exactly where this plant will take Jessup,
Where the void is, perceived in the mind, remains something of a question in my graphs thus far, there are three such possible places, either a level of hell on earth, especially the Bottomless Pit, which is level five; or Tartarus, where planets are, below even that. Then, there are just the farther reaches of the sentient, which remain mysterious, still to be colonized, as it were.
In modernist thought, however, my sense was that, given the overload of rationality, the mind was divided from the depths by the Eyes Wide Shut syndrome, meaning that the void could literally be anything in the perceived blackness below.
but this bruja is a very precise artist, it is a simple one, two, three. You will see a dot. That is a door at the end of a tunnel, It could be an outlet of any level of hypnagogy. Then, however, that will emit a streak. This is called the Crack Between Nothing, Because the dot speaks to an approach through a corridor, I place it on the devil’s road, coming out of a whoosh nightmare splat. That then drops down directly into the void perceived here as the bottomless pit, at the upper levels of which, is the Crack Between Nothing, and then under that the Unborn Soul. Something like this.
Jessup, having more experience in the east, is excited that this Mexican bruja is talking just like a Tibetan monk. Then it begins, but, again, pretty prescriptively
and so the dot is a mile below,
then it surprises, by itself, the dot, expanding, attenuating, until it becomes a slit, then, a crack. So the dot is not separate, it is the first appearance of the crack, and the crack is a dot that like an anus or vulva has a contracting, expanding power
then, Jessup sees it begin to spit out illumination, which he, right away, takes as the original illumination of the universe.
then, enormous waves. Engulfing even him
as part of that he turns into a white spot, I use yellow
switching to accommodate my model… of the pit to the bottomless pit the dot then expands into eternal horizons. Effulgent means brightly radiant, I think PC used vocabulary words like I use new demon names, to place things, so this the Effulgence (parallel to my understanding of it coming out of the pit in, for example, Amityville 3).
then a flurry of words
annulated, involuted, vermiform, and this leads to a vision of holy chromosomes. Something like this (though in visualizing it seems to want a close-up of the chromosome, in order to underscore the unborn and genetic nature of this vision).
Like a Microscopic View of Holy Chromosomes, Altered States, 1978, 51, May 20 2023
Clearly, with those words, PC attempts to create in the prose the equivalent of what you envision, though seeing it is hard.
Then, the brown figure comes out of the original pinspot, now black
and it is a formlike mass with limbs and organs pulsating out of it, here and there, all over, something like this.
Features Kept Dissolving Into and Out of Itself, Altered States, 1978, 51, May 20, 2023.
Then he sees it is expanding neural matter, and there are little fire sparks of exploding neural matter, as the form expands and at the same time shades into red, then orange, then gold, something like this.
This Thing Became Huger and Huger, and Its Color Became Redder and Redder, Altered States, 1978, 51, Nay 20 2023
Jessup, rather too rationally, sees again a tibetan reference, ages of red and gold. The important point here is that he sees this as neural matter, exploding, While that seems to effulge out in waves, things suddenly turn violent, a lizard enters the picture (as in Russell), and the thing zaps it,
My version, I see green when I hear the word lizard, in the book it is bright yellow (this same beast showed up in Journey to the Center of the Earth),
A Large Lizard Was Engulfed By The Flaming Molten Substance, Altered States, 1978, 51, May 20m 2023.
And then the substance beast eats Jessup, the most exhilarating moment of his life.
hmm, like this? This eating of him, after the thing had eat of others, and of space, sounds a lot like a matryoshka formation, and for him to think being eaten by a formless monster to then by that be as if shit to the outer limits of the world, this also sounds to me like psalliction in essence. But, then, they are between the ommatidian and the jess (and isn’t it odd that day after I use the term Jess to describe a demon of the mind, I jump to Altered States and the main character’s name is Jessup?) I devised, last night, LIVE, in the moment, that if one experienced that stretching out in a benign way, that means that the tearing apart creature was really a variant, Psalmx, he who plucks you up and out, as if on the harp of space, and this seems to be what is happening here. Still, Jessup is very much a strong prepossessed singleton ego who finds being torn apart as a rare pleasure, and not a threat of annihilation, as my body without organs might.
It Was the Most aExhiliaring Moment of His Life, Altered States, 1978, 52, May 20, 2023.
In Russell’s movie, he takes you way, way out, here, Jessup is always really in control, and even when he comes back the shaman knows exactly what happened to him because this is a specific plant with a specific result in terms of hallucination (this reminds me of Marguerite Humeau’s New Museum piece a while back), as such
And then we have a cultural dispute, PC compares the Hinchi to small children, who do not know the difference between waking and dreaming, so they witnessed him eat the lizard, while Jessup is like, this was a dream, how can you look into my dreams?
and, then, and I do wonder if this line of discussion was not suggested to PC by scientology, rhey argue over whether hallucinations externalize.
this is a good moment that places Jessup in his frustrum, and his rationalism, whilst the Hinchi see (unclear if they had to take the substance too, to see him eat the lizard), in a state of syngogy, where you do not know if you are awake or asleep, and dreams therefore could be construed as real; and, then, externalization in a more definite form, if that lizard was real, would be moving on up to epigogy, the seeing of monsters as dream, but also as real.
and, I think we have switched now over to one of the unending scientific discussions by which PC ruins the novel, or novellete, the psychoactive element of this plant is repeatable, that is, every time, the same simple hallucination, dot, crack, creature, lizard, devour done.
then we get a scientific reading of the hallucination, a bit like the description of a dream after one has woken up from it, and forgotten the details.
and then we come to it, the original nuclear self. They have already decided that that is where they went,
then more weirdness, no spindling, spindle is when you impale a piece of paper on a speared object as a form of temporary filing, and keeping, that’s what no spindle or mutilate means, here it implies that the readings usually do spindle, but this one went straight in like a shot, also it only goes to the limbic, also weird, but all this scientific cops and robbers, deadly to the narrative.
Then, back in Boston, he goes back in, in the sensory deprivation tank, and he sees old megaliths, but it seems like he is seeing them from afar in a internal biology way, because he describes one stone as a thole, which is large pin that serves as the fulcrum to an oar in a rowboat, the thing that clanks, if you remember, this feels like the image of David’s capsule in 2001 when he enters into the space beyond, which has a kind of endoscopic gooeyness to it; and, then, more importantly, he quickly goes through a phase of being a blastula, which is an early animal embryo state consisting of a hollow ball of cells, and then a caul is pulled over it. But, this is all interim hallucinating, which he did not experience in Mexico, and he thinks it is time linked because all he is seeing is old, old stones, from the earliest ages of man.
all I can make of this is that in the tank the descents or ascents are articulated by, in him, he going through stages of embryonic gestation, so from a thole to a blastula with a caul over it, and then he sees around him scenes of paleolithic life, stones (this could be an endoscopic view of wandering gall stones, and he might be being turned topsy turvy as in a chloleangiopancreateography, which I had in January, but the fun thing here in terms of storied tropes is that a blastula manifestation of self covered by a clairvoyant inducing caul is a kind of teratoma if it gets stuck and does not develop)
A Blastula With a Furrowed Fetal Caul, Altered States, 1978, 63, May, 20, 2023.
Then, as the polygraph makes faces, with its scrawling fingers, an image I only first saw recently rewatching The Quiet Ones, Jessup, describing everything, with rational remove, ponders the fact that the crack opens up by an infolding, like the development of fetal neural tubes.
the fetal neural tube is the first formation of the brain and spine
and defects in this is one of the early lines of problems that can happen,
so, once again, without any but conversational enthusiasm, Jessup is imposing upon a mystic experience a primal but also fetal experience, comparing the infolding of the crack to the first development of this stage of an embryo.
We then, later, get a more technical explanation of the eating of the person, as if by a paramecium
and here we are, scientific visualizations of the eating (these also a lot like artist Richard Hawkins’ visualizations of the green forms in the zone of decomposition where fetuses are eaten up by the zap).
but the thing is, images of paramecium eating are not very pleasant, caudatum means something with a tail, like a paramecium.
Then , somehow, Jessup passes into the Id
this itself could be an externalization of PC, was the id ever placed anywhere in the mind or brain? Unclear. But, then, a scream, a strangulated rictus (I find the PC vocabularies promising, but he never breaks them out from their scientific correctness).
where is this id? It sounds like, from this, pandemonious, fourth layer of hell on earth
Twin Cones of Volcanic Craters Like Owl’s Eyes, Altered States, 1978, 65,. May 20, 2023
And then a whole journey to the center of the earth description of a volcanic landscape with syncline, or a depression, and then it all begins to crack up, it feels like a mondo picture in a frame, in his mind, imposed upon something, what? hell on earth envisioning in the id.
Geosyncline! My God! It’s Cracking, Altered States, 1978, 65, May 20, 2023
And, then, and, then…he says it, the magic word for me, the bottomless pit, which locates it,
A Fucking Mountain Is Raging Up From The Bottomless Pit! Altered States, 65, May 20, 2023.
Using a simple graphic to depict the bottomless pit, its appearance as a trope usually entails a scaffold structure holding rocks, or floating rocks. I have seen such all this past season, since my brother had a problem on a mountain, in the work of Mike Nelson, Sarah Sze, Haim Steinbach, and it keeps on going, and here, he is identifying the bottomless pit as part of the id, and the id as a mountain growing up from it, with deafening, not tinnital noise. Oh, and then there are floating rocks
Fifty Ton Rocks Are Rising Out of The Sea, Altered States, 1978, 66., May 20, 2023.
But, then, in pure scirp form, this could be a description, following from the development of the neural tube, a geographic overdescription of the development, by his theory, of the whole psychodynamic system, the cenote, the Tarpeiian Rock, the nightmare falls, the bounce outs, the redoubts, all of it, as if enmeshed in rock.
Fifty Ton Rocks Are Rising Out of The Sea, Altered States, 1978, 66, May 20, 2023.
I argue in the case of Godard’s Contempt (1963) that Bardot formed her contempt for her husband the moment she realized that Paul was using her to pimp her out to cajole a business associate to make things go his way, and she hates him for this objectification. We get the same gesture and moment here, as Helene uncomfortably starts to sweat when Putzi announces he has to leave the room for minute, which to her only means, “you are leaving me alone with this man? And knowing what you know, wtf?”
the scene is shot, and its clumsy mis en scene is staged, as a kind of Christmas Morning, and the trope here is that Christmas morning is the central morning of the child’s life. It is the morning where they know or not that everything they wish for in life will be given them. So it is a grotesque compounding of earlier described scenes of Hitler simply playing with Egon to make the scene he has to enact with regard to Helene in front of Egon. This is a rationalization in the creepy shitty sense that a pornographic scene where a son needs help with a Viagra-created boner from his stepmother, devious. But, then, now and then, to keep up the illusion that this all happened by accident with no one to blame in a situation where bodies got too close together in the course of a life event, and bodies being bodies and human beings being entirely uncontrollable when it comes to sex after one is turned on, in the same way, the confrontation between Hitler and Helene is folded inside a rationalized alibi formation of Egon’s Christmas morning to as if cover up the sexual nature of it.
and since Egon is on the floor, and Hitler has just been down on his knees, and remembering, maybe every day he was in prison, how he slid down her body, his life saved by her sexuality, maybe even by a whiff of it, as Carmela Soprano characterized it, he then engages her as if it is just more of Christmas cheer hugging.
he then speaks to her like a cheap romance schoolboy, I absolutely do NOT believe this, it is a fantasy of the bourgeoise imagination, meant to humanize a monster. I will now provide a reading of Mein Kampf in which it is demonstrated that every word written is really but an allegory of his thinking of her, because he says, after all, “I thought of nothing but you”, really?
she is trying hard to say stop, but by this point maybe she is not saying stop. In reality, Helene dismissed and laughed off Hitler’s crush on her as boyishly stupid, a teenage thing, and believed him to be a “neuter,” that is entirely nonsexual. That is, of course, a worse death sentence of one’s hope than “I’m flattered, but we can only be friends,” as well I know, but here, she is receptive, if hoping he will stop, because Putzi might walk in at any moment. Then he shifts, it was not about that, that is not what is meant, what he means is he is grateful because she saved his life, This may be true, indeed, it is reported in Fest that Hitler did say this in later days, that Helene saved his life. This then means that now and then in the feed that is churned out of peripheral online publications, relics of the magazine-onlline boom of twenty years ago, that she is the woman who saved Hitler’s life, and if she had only crushed his hopes, or not so acted, he would not have pulled that trigger and six million Jews would not have died, so that is on her, six million jews, this is how people talk when it is all about sex.
About that wording, it reminds me of one of the signal purposes of middle-class popular art edificatory art, to disarm the public. Such as Ben Hur reporting on his conversation to Christianity, “And he took the sword from out of my hand”, so this sanctifies and removes sexuality from the picture. Then he backs off. If you want a woman, but you have got into the clinch in a sideways way, by way of violating the friend zone, or inside a rationalization, the last thing you want to then say is “I admire you”. Statues and art are admired, sexual women are loved, this again is a rationalization, even a backing off on his part.
The word “beautiful”, however, brings it back to her physical being, and that would be sex, no? so she unparts her lips, possibly a little turned on by this, maybe alarmed at THIS MAN having a sexual thing for her.
But, then, her eyes again, they are whispering, they are trying to steer him clear of friendzone suicide. He still kisses her, but a kiss on the back of the hand can be taken as a mere courtesy, sex again comes in under the cover of a courtesy (alas, everyone can relate to this sort of moment, and by the way it is this juncture which is basically the whole subject of Munch Cycle of Life paintings).
And then he sinks again to her knees and solicits from there. In this mawkish soap opera version of this incident, which is recorded in Conradi, we shall see if it is in Putzi’s memoir, the danger of the moment is circumscribed by Putzi gazing down on it all from above. Is it, That bastard, making a pass at my wife, or there, there, it’s just a prison thing, I will let it go
I believe in this scene he does put his head in her lap. This is, if approached directly, a clear sexual thing, to bring the whole of her into him, here it has been rationalized, and defanged, as an act of gratitude, a little excessive, but she did save his life,
and then they are, continuing the melodramatics, interrupted by the husband
and they dissemble
The psychodynamics here, a departure from Conradi, as I googled Helene to see what merited she such adulation, and it remains a mystery, she was sehr Deutsch in a heavy sort of way. The blackness is all the disastrous fall out of the failed putsch, nothing yet by his prison experience put behind him. She becomes in this situation, in such intimacy, alone in an upper hallway, in a crisis, the talker-down, the ultimate Hitler whisperer, and one cannot doubt that it was likely the power of her sexuality and her decolletage, her heaving breast, a staple of romantic bodice ripper fiction, that in fact eased the gun from Hitler’s hand. (one also suspects it was also all staged by him to curry more favor from her, to, that is, increase their intimacy, even to cop a feel before she backs him off. It is humorous that in the terms of the day, Helene, though she knew of the crush, did not in any way respond, having been originally repulsed by Hitler, considering him a “neuter”.).
Richard Hughes’ The Fox in the Attic (1961) attempts to prompt visualization of similar scenes in the life of Hanfstaengl in his Hitler years. It is weird, this whole tropaic formation, whereby a fiction writer inserts fictional characters into history and then toggles back and forth between the dreamy unreality of the fiction and then the histrionic unreality of the history. A mode of historical novel that I loathe almost as much as that other staple of popular fiction, the writing of several storylines, jumping back and forth from one to the other. We open then on a fictional description of Hitler’s Putsch, in the impressionable language of an ego that will see what it must. At the kellar, suddenly, young Hermann Goering shows up with a machine gun squad, add an exclamation mark. How is the shock of this impressionistically described, “steel helmets seemed to appear instantly out of nowhere, at every door, every window, all over the hall itself. And then Pandemonion broke loose! Shrieks and shouts, crashing furniture and smashing beer jugs….punctuated by that short sharp ululation peculiar to women in furs 192 Something like this
Eyes Wide Shut view of the Putsh, Fox in the Attic, 7 7 22
That is, he tries to capture the chaos of the scene by in his mind picturing psychological life entirely as consisting of the whoosh of the spiral down to the nightmare. In the first spin are a circling of helmets and machine guns, in the second the whole of the scenario is dismantled to be entirely rendered as a wider spiral, I particularly like the bit about woman having a certain kind of ululating voice, if they happen to be wearing furs. In Rise of Evil, of course, Helene’s fur exemplified her appearance of being cultured butw ith a wild will behind, almost a scryer of human feeling. This more or less conforms to one of the first tropes I studied in 1930s movies, the white fox fur, or, simply, the old fox-headed furs that women wore before WW2 which rendered on film women as hunted animals, but also hunting animals. Then, too in Hitler and Geli (1997, Hayman), a passing comment is made that Hitler hated furs because he hated cigarette smoke and apparently furs were notorious for collecting smoke smells in them, thus making women in furs unappealing to him. Interesting. But it is all so to trope, and more, as we will see, that it represents rather to me not an authentic visualization of the happening itself but an Eyes Wide Shut view of a memory in the mind immersed in a whoosh view of the irrational mind below, and this shut-eye of a rational author at his desk is fed him from a tychon whose white eyes seek to hypnotize him.
Back to the putsch. Next up, Hitler jumps up, and is panting, “he scans the crowds like a dog circling a bitch, he was profoundly excited, and all the faces in the crowd looking on him seemed to arouse in him a veritable orgasm, he does not woo the crowd, he rapes it”, 103c.
Eyes Wide Shut as Hitler rapes the crowd, fox in the attic 7 7 22
Same problem here, eyes wide shut, when it seeks to visualize drama, sees only the whoosh, the spiral, thus as in the Ambient Circle trope the crowd now circles around him and their response to his rhetoric is seen as sexual, him then as a walking hackenkreuz transformed into a phallus ejaculating irrational passion stickily all over everyone’s faces, a mass facial, but, also, since this erogenous view of Hitler, so common in the modern period (I am currently reading Hitler and Geli (1997)and its quote that Hitler was kinky like something out of Kraft-Ebbing took me by hyperreading to read that too. The point of this whole subdiscourse of sentimental rationalization is that Hitler killed six million jews because he was a sexual sadist). This also features the homosexual scurry, and thus in this pseudoscripograph faces are also bleeding assholes, it is unseemly, that a novel would seek to arouse such feelings in a reader. An added element here is that, as we will see, Hughes also describes Hitler’s distress on the attic bed in Uffing in orgasmic termes, enlisting the metaphor of the sea and crashing waves, and it is also true Kokoscha’s description of the sex which inspired his Bride and the Wind in the same ecstatic-transcendent-idealizing form, and then too today I had cause to look up Giacometti’s The Palace at Four AM and he too provides the rationale that it captures the ecstasy that he lived in with a woman for six months. Thus, all part and parcel of the corny language of modern love in neorococo middlebrow culture.
Anyways, nor can I resist another scripograph from Hughes’ absurd rewrite of Hitler’s public orgasm at the putsch, he cries out, the Hackenkreuz is marching! The Army is marching! The Police is marching! Everybody (in italics) is marching! 192 How do I visualize this?
The Hackenkreuz is marching! Fox in the Attic, 7 7 22
Once again, a chaos image pictured by Eyes Wide Shut seeing the irrational only as a spiral or whoosh to the end. That is, lacking in visual wisdom, and imagination, a stock image which bounces off the auhor’s first claim to the limits of imagination, stirring up the reader’s mind. That Hitler was pictured as a walking swastika in Simplissimus I have evidence. That this trope then spread to form a sort of put-down trope that all of this ridiculous goosestepping troops were also only walking hackenkreuz’s is the gist of this scene. As Munich in Rise of Evil is pictured as a kind of Paris of boulevards enclosed by buildings, a maze, then too under a cloud cover on a rainy day adds to the image of contagion spreading out over all. In the lore of imagery of figurations of states of evil, however, the jerky movement that Hitler partook of and in which the Nazi soldiers demonstrated by said step is part and parcel of the trope that emerged in the period that the jerky, spindly, spiderwalking nature of movement in beings in horror and some in dance (here the Josephine Baker link to Mary Wigman in 20s dance in Milk of Dreams applies), this was a well worn trope symbolizing demonic possession. Even more startling is that, as this visualizing mania continues, soon enough Hughes compares that image to insects, “those ant-soldiers, all those sinister animated insects and those rabbits and weasels on their hind legs…and above all, Hitler,…yes it was Wagner, but Wagner staged by Hieronymous Bosch, 195 Though this does touch upon hell on earth visualizations, wherein picturing the streets of a town as formicarian is a staple, and reducing the soldiers to mere entomes of automated body parts without will sustained by a witches spell alone applies here, Hughes makes use of it in an Eyes Wide Shut way to enlist insects to help visualize by shortcut a depth of mind he cannot get to (in my 20s, in the early experimental novels, I often visualized descent into closets as into undersea climates, that is, the under the bed space), but visualized in a kind of suffocating frustum that only placates the rational mind to accept the put down as authentic and purposeful. And it goes on, he also lampoons Hitler’s unwillingness to engage in debate, waiting until the other side of the debate winds down to silence, this documented by Fest, and by Hayman (Hitler and Geli). If anybody speaks to him he fills his mouth with cream puffs and grunts. If they dare to speak a second time he only fills his mouth with cream puffs. It isn’t just that in the company of betters he cant converse himself, he aims to be a kind of social upas, to kill conversation anywhere within reach of his shadow, 199. An “upas” is a poison tree said in legend to spread the poison through a forest, so another organic this time vegetable metaphor to capture the oral fixation of his emphasis on rhetoric, to dismiss it. The company of his betters again exposes this sort of physical lampoon as simply the function of a superior class attitude in dismissing Hitler and his ilk and thus makes precisely the same mistake that Von Papen et al made for real when they thought they could contain him with conscience and culture. Hughes use of slang, in short choppy sentences, a popular fiction mix of Joyce and Ford Maddox Ford, by 1961 had become a tired patter. Indeed, when I read a passage of fiction in this patter, set between scenes from history, it feels like inadequate fill, exposing the novel as nothing but a purposeful obfuscation, that is, anti-reading, which so much of popular fiction is (Ok, I am a bit testy on this point today because a neurologist in the NYT said that a person switching from fiction to nonfiction is a bad sign in terms of the onset of dementia, because it takes a lot of mind to follow fictional stories, and while I concede I had zero interest in the characters that Hughes had invented to embroider history, I reject the argument in full). Worse, then, when there is English patter, as in this passage, when we hear why Hitler was called the White Crow, Damned unpopular with the men too, such a silent, killjoy sort of cove (slang for chap or fellow). No normal interests—he couldn’t even join the others in a good grumble! That’s why they called him the ‘white crow.’ he was always the odd man out. 202
Lothar, who is one of the characters, I suppose, then picks up to describe his version of the Nazi marches in Munich in the 20s, the mounting elation and the rhythmic, stupefying effect of the Nazi march down the Brienner Strasse, the crowd growing like a snowball….that absurd tumbling urchin….the woman smelling of carbolic soap who sprang forward out of the crowd and kissed him… that other woman who kept thrusting a crucifix into his hand, 203. In a critical indexing of the historical veracity of the treatment of the Hanfstaengl’s representation in the novel, Ivo Holmqvist in From Putsch to Purge (2000), uses literary theory and the word “focalizer” to describe the source of a POV. Apparently, Hughes did much shifting on this point, and such shifting, of course, is a thing in literature. But if it is not evocative of the reality of the human mind as it remembers and sees, then, again, it all feels like confetti crumbling away as you read it, the text feels like a rickety bridge, a mere narrative feint, to get from point A to point B, and tossing in the metaphor of snowball, which it would be if it was rolling down hill, and urchin, a metaphor for the look of rifled-manned troops going back, even, unto the Renaissance, and the first rendering of armies in the medium of print to picture them as inherently menacing under a low sky and a short land, they are no help. Worse, it was a standard finding in my own structuralist analysis of the weakness of texts that at some point the unselfcritical writer exposes himself by providing images that, in fact. bespeak his interfering presence and the shortcomings of the text, and previously that shadow that stops conversation, the white crow, now, this interrupting woman, with her smell of carbolic soap, all of these are, in fact, figures of Eyes Wide Shut, and his presence as an interfering narrator, blocking as much as describing scenes, aporia that exposes him.
To place Hughes within his mind trap, most of the time he reduces an incident to a symbolic level description, as if by metaphor in the glass onion can capture it. When he describes Hitler escaping from the city, he mentions a psychological point d-appui, google tells me this is an old fashioned word for the rallying point or base point at which a troop in trouble regroups to pivot off of to proceed, and it is fair to say that when being described by a tychon, an extradiegetic presence, interfering with memory, all things are thus reduced. Then, again, when Hitler is running, once again, the text interjects an interfering presence, he was acutely aware of the delicately nurtured schoolgirl wheeling her bicycle at his very elbow, 220. Then the moment when the guns fire at him and others with locked arms he describes it, again, in a glass onion shortcut metaphor way, it came like a sudden inexplicable unwilled lurch of a planchette at a séance,,,that swing of the whole group…into a right-wheel turn,. 220. Then, he settles that in the point d-appui, if you will, of the girl, it caught her unawares so she fell over her bicycle and tore her stockings…..so, wait, you end up trying to visualize Hitler being shot at in a public march and it ends with you thinking of a tear in a girl’ stocking? The crowd behind is also described in animal metaphors, in the glass onion, that is, calling for a graphic representation in the mind, the whole cheering ‘follow my leader’ crocodile followed, 220. This girl is Tascha, a character, and, again, though some of the subsequent passages are not bad, she is pictured as the one to see the street bright with blood, 225; who gets back on her bicycle to wobble between the dead and dying, with the purpose of getting plenty of splashes of blood on her bicycle wheels, 225, all point d appui tychon blocks, 225.
But let’s get on to Uffing. Hitler is pictured as like a frog in the fable who had tried to play a role too big for him and burst, 228. In his version of the events at Uffing, Hughes does separate his arrival, to him spending days in the attic.
Before we get to the attic, Mitzi, one of the characters, sees Hitler cast into an apparently hypnagogic state, dropping in and out of dream, in the Land of Nod, as I call it, he stirred and moaned, tellingly, again, under the heavy piles of furs in the corner as the sleeping figure, 231. Then “we” look down on him sleeping, and observe that he is having one of his red dreams, when everywhere there is always blood, 231. He was dreaming of dragging himself over heaps of bodies, and from their open bellies the entrails wreathed towards him. When they wound themselves round him they were barbed, like barbed wire, 231 (ok, wreathed is not bad).
Hitlers arrival in Uffing, at least, has some psychodynamic sense, because he is arriving at the dream structure of the Black House, at the edge of ambience as it breaks to sentience, and to get there he arrived on foot, through the fields, after dark, late that Black Friday evening, muddy and hatless, so Helene immediately shows him up to bed, no histrionics in the foyer, 259. Then, in the attic the doctor’s tried to relocate his dislocated shoulder, so that is genuine, then Hitler saw that Putzi’s English travelling rug was folded on him so he rolled himself in the rug as tight as a cocoon to ease the pain, and lay there in the corner, 261. Then, a strange Land of Nod back and forth, he hears water, it sounded like rain…or like a river…like the Danube flooding its banks in the spring rising…gurgling into cellars, murmuring, menacing, still rising. 261. Then sounds from downstairs are woven into Hitler’s obsessional fear of water, 261. This is picked up later. Here, Hughes does describe a syndrome, as as he nods in and out of sleep, his legs kept trying to run on his own volition like a dreaming dog’s. Indeed, his whole nervous system seemed to be disevering itself from central control, that superb instrument he had been used to playing on at will now twanged suddenly and discordantly like a concert piano when a cat jumps on the keys, 264. Ok, domestic metaphors, but this is a real sleep syndrome, and does, in taking body dislocation further than the hackenkreuz, at least acknowledge its possible part in the trope of the demonic, 264. He also sees the book piles next to him, and that the books are exchanging titles like jugglers throwing balls, 264. Then he has a kind of ridiculous fantasy of what he might’ve done, in Berlin, 265; then, equally odd, and very much a flipside version of the above whoosh-generalization, a barell changes into a man, a figure of fright from his Viennese youth, 265; then, weirdly, the dark corners of the room were filling with soft naked legs, those Viennese harlots sitting halfnaked in the lighted windows, he used to go there….just to look at them, (thus, wait, he is lamenting his own sexual impotence?), In the middle of all this, Hitler has a moment like what I call a Morning Storm, when, the mind thinking of things, breaks into a kind of proclamatory speech of what one might say if life was ideal and stagey, and so it is here that Hughes pauses to have Hitler rant to himself again his defensive conviction as to why he cannot have sex, The flame of life, that holy flame of seed in the center of man, and his flame has to be kept burning without fuel for at the first real touch of human, female fuel it must turn smoky, and fill his whole vessel with soot. This was his destiny, it ever Hitler did it the unique power would go out of him. Like Samson and his hair, 266; how could he succumb to the entire act of sex, the whole essence of which is recognition of one Other, without damage to his fixed conviction that he was the universe’ unique sentient center, the sole authentic incarnate will it contained or had ever contained, 266, I am, none else beside me, 266. At this point ,Hughes backs off in extradiegetic analysis, his was an ego virtually without penumbra, rare and diseased, an ego of a baby surviving in a insane adult. Hitler’s adult Iife had developed thus, into a larger but still undifferentiated structure, as a malignant growth does, 267. Soon enough, he was tossing, and drowning (what of all things Hitler most feared), 267 Then, in the green watery light surrounding him a dead face was floating, his mother, 268, but now that face was multiplied, it was all around him in the water. So, his mother was this water, these waters drowning him!, 268. Though he then slept, all of this serves as a preface to when Helene comes into the room. She tells him that the police are coming, he is in the big blue bathrobe and he begins turning like a top in his efforts to draw his revolver with his one good arm, Those swine! They will never take me alive! At this point, Helene grabbed the gun in his hand, and all wound up in the bathrobe Hitler seemed to struggle demonically, his word, 240 And yet this was no struggle, he let go of it, and then when he does the frenzy subsides, and he realizes it is Helene, 270. He did not seem to realize what had been going on here though he himself was still panting from it, and then he looked at her wonderingly surprised to see the beautiful Helene of all people just a wee bit disheveled, 270. And that’s that.
There is some insight into a type of dream called the hover dream, very much like the one I wrote about in the movie The Robe (1953), that is, Hitler is situated hypnagogically as if in the very in-between turbulence itself nodding in and out of sleep, at times dreaming, at other times commenting on his dreaming, at times feeling like he is drowning, at other times engaging in proclamatory Morning Storm self-maniacal monologues. This is fairly authentic. It is also of interest that as he has in effect swaddled himself in a blue blanket cocoon to press against pain, this seems to spark in him a visualization that he is underwater, or falling into water, and then he sees things in water, all of this related to his avowed phobia of water. As a narrative detail, this trope relates to the vampire’s fear of running water, and bespeaks his revulsion at the more immersive aspects of physical life. Thus, in his delirium, he is cast into a vision of water, in terror, and that seems to cause him to repeat to himself his personal rationalization for why he cannot have sex. It is precisely this immersion in the other, and that theory of sex is highly questionable, very, in fact, ecstatic-modernist, that he then is haunted by a mermaid form, a vision of his mother, all around him. We are once again in the whoosh, and as the hackenkreuz men or the faces in the crowd at the putsch, that ambient circle is replaced in a form of insectoid ommatidia, which is what seeing all those faces is in a fly’s eye, he sees his mother,
Baby Hitler drowned by his mother, in the attic, Fox in the Attic, 7 7 22
As I picture it, the tychon here has melted into the ommatidian vision of his mother, and instead of remembering her I place her eyes in the famous portrait of her in Hitler biographical literature where that gaze is so scary, and reproduced so scarily in pictures of Hitler in Landsberg prison and on the campaign trail in Fest’s creepy 70s paperback visions of pictures of him, that it all tacitly supports the rationale that his mother was to blame, and it was because of a problem in the nurturing of him that he did not develop and thus remains cocooned in a womb of blue blanket in his adult life, that is, a mad Blue Boy, the wrongful scapegoat who nonetheless had fashioned for himself a mad contra mundem vision of selfhood where he was the pharmakon of the world one day to come back to rule over all those who once shunned him.
Sex mermaids of Vienna splashing out the Flame of Life in Hitler, fox in the attic, 7 7 22
And, then, through the intermediary of a glass onion level imagining of the blue blanket he is twisting in to get a gun, it becomes as if the precipitate of that water, as mother turns into Helene, and she is the mermaid, but with no sex, who then can reach over him, possibly even in her dishevelment to press her breasts into his face, or close to it, thereby to disarm him, but this told here in an entirely nonsexual way. Still, the imagery is there,
Helene as mother disarms the suicide in the attic, fox in the attic, 7 7 22
In this, Helene is rendered as a bedside demon, she manifests for real in waking life out the imaginings of Viennese hookers and his vision of himself as the Flame of Life, and then his mother swimming in the substance of his phobia, water, and now the water in dream precipitates in the waking, as it would, in a lattice position sleeper, dealing with a hover dream, into his blue blanket; and she then in a nonsexual way, but in a way that does dishevel her, meaning that there was physical contact of an intimate sort in the brief wrestling match, and thus by her soft hand and his “pinax” ideal of perfect womanhood, turned out to the opposite of his cult of motherhood, she saves his life.
In many ways, and wrapped in such strange essentialist theories of sex, the really weird thing about this whole description, written in the 1950s, is that it still subscribes to the same logic which saw sex as transcendence which imbues Kokoshka’s description of sex with Alma which inspired the highly oceanic Bride of the Wind (1913)
And then too Giacometti’s description, rather more plaintive, of sex, which generated the Palace at 4 am, him however lifting up out of the dream so quickly that he can only look upon it all in a love among the ruins way as a something that happened but without basis in reality and thus fleeting, the forms of the Palace, then, in the context of Nerval’s fantasies of sex saviorship, being the flotsam that floats up to conscious life, when it all quickly fades away (and I noted today that artist Josh Johnson’s work at his exhibit at South Indiana University was of the palace at 4 am quality, ware at least of dream forms simmering under the surface).
I further suspect the permeation of Putzi’s imaginary with rococo scenes of romantic heroship, meaning that he got to the point of being out of touch with reality much sooner than even Hitler did, in that his labor of love, which he hoped would make of him a respected scholar, America and Europe from Marlborough to Mirabeau, published and well-received in 1930. Conradi reports that no less than Oswald Spengler, reviewing the proof, sucked up by declaring it the first example of original historical thought in two decades, 76, which is odd since Spengler’s own Decline of the West volume 1 was published in 1918.
I did find a 10$ copy, so ordered it with an Amazon Gift card. The blurb said that it has 41 plates, which mean to me it is an important document in filling in the blanks of Putzi’s imaginary, involved in a nineteenth century dream world, carried over conservatively into the modern age, the primary element of which is the idealization of womanhood as the core of civilized culture.
The fact that Putzi might been brainwashed even without knowing it is due to his inheritance, the family firm goes back to Franz Hanfstaengl, painter to the Wittelsbach Bavarian kings, but also a publisher of fine art prints primarily of genre scene art, academic history painting, and, more than anything else, rococo genre pictures, and rococo pictures of high society ladies, and even princesses and queens too. Indeed, though Conradi does not go into it too often, his apologia for Putzi’s involvement with the Nazis is that he did so in the hope that he could civilize Hitler and save him from the more boorish Nazis around him. It is a pretty facile defense.
But then the second element of this culture is that Hitler himself was made kind of sick by the overidealization of women, and looked to women for spiritual solace, but as it turned out in a sick way. Thus, in the culture of the time, there was a clash between traditional rococo culture idealism, and modern body-as-machine Weimar culture, and in this split, in the culture of ldealization was a blunting softening force that made it impossible for Putzi et al to see the full scale of the danger of Hitler. Indeed, just as after the French Revolution reactionary culture was permeated by martyr stories of the nobility undone by the revolution, so in the culture of defeat after World War 1, there was a similar surge, in contrast to Weimarlike promiscuity, idealization of woman, and this blinded conservative nobles and upper class educated antisemites from the full horror of the situation.
I had a triple rrhexis of hyperreading “resourcing” in a meander, finding ample evidence that the Hanfstaengl fine art reproduction business had a powerful impact on conservative culture by publishing prints squarely placed in neorococo genre culture. And also the classics, but with a focus on genre scenes, and in prints with a decidedly unreal look to them, which must be looked at. And then too in books published by Franz Hanfstaengl himself, he featured academic genre portrait artists who focused on primarily rococolike portraits of lovely ladies.
Then, the whole history of the Hanfstaengl firm has to be factored in, and its two country origin, Germany and the United States. In addition to that Hanfstangel comes from a line that combined Germans with the Sedgwicks, meaning that he is descended from a general who pallbore Lincoln’s coffin at his funeral, from the Civil war era, and this tradition of elite culturing went right on back up through the whole issue of how antisemitic Harvard was when Hanfstangel returned to visit his 25th anniversary in the 30s, the topic of a book by Norwood (Nazi in Our Midst, 2004). Then, beyond that, that also means that Edie Segwick is involved in the long line of beautiful girls of deep hereditary legacy in mainstream WASP America, in Massachusetts.
And as I want to argue that rococo culture had a pacifying effect on conservative culture, and thus might well have contributed to the indifference of the wealthy to the danger of the rise of Hitler, this constitutes a theory of social response as to how the Nazis came to power, with a whole historiographic debate based on der Sonderweg, or the idea that Germans were cursed, or apologetics that the main problem was indifference, a whole hornet’s nest of theory, to discuss.
And then I learned that Richard Hughes, in the Fox in The Attic (1961) made use of the Hanfstangels as characters, so read up on the degree to which he accurately used sources, and what those sources were, and how he came to them, usually by contacting survivors in the 50s. Then, later that night I read the novel, and, my goodness, very much a popular fiction approach, with a very strange characterization of the incidents I have focused on above, Hitlers declaration of love to Helene, and then Helene being a Hitler whispering by talking a suicidal gun out of his hand.
And, for that too, it is also true that most mainstream TV is deeply ensconced in rococo high culture, or romantic ideal love culture, and so I have some movies to watch, and did watch, in fact, Rise of Evil (2003), which had some very odd, and entirely off, depictions of the Hangstaengls and their relation to Hitler. And that I also have to watch other movies where the Hanfstaengls factor in.
Finally, a case study that could be made use of as a counter example to the case of Hitler with his woman, Kokosckha’s affair with Alma Mahler, this coming into the picture due to an exhibit by Soshira Matsubara in London
“Though he sometimes delves into areas of sex that are NFM*, Soshiro Matsubara, who is my current fav in terms of being knowledgeable of the many psychodynamic ways humans “figure out” emotions and dreams in sculpture, he has rejoined his ongoing obsession with Kokoshkas short, sick love affair with his ideal woman, Alma Mahler, at current show, Union Pacific, London, which I am also interested in. Since Kokoshka’s love was deeply influenced by WW1 and thus impacted by PTSD, his case parallels Hitler’s sick relationship with sex re Helene Hanfstaengl and Geli Raubal. I seem to have stumbled into trying to figure out how romantic “ideal woman” ie Blue Boy/Pinkie postrococo bourgeoisie culture muted attentive response to Hitler politically, I might take up the issue of what dream form Hermine Moos’ swan song sex doll made for K fits in. It could be as simple as Moos knew the holier than thou Alma was a rabid antisemite, and created a scarecrow in mockery (Moos, who has zero google presence, died young in ’28, her sister later committed suicide rather than go to the camps, her mother age 77 was murdered by Hitler’s henchmen at Treblinka). But picture-of-the-moment, Matsubara’s version of Kokoschka’s Knight Errant (1915), Bride and the Wind (1915), also here, depicts orgasm in a cheap romance way, etc, Matsubara’s A Little Kiss (2022) on rug).(*not for me). To be continued”.
This incident, or psychosis, is both an epigogic psychosis, that is, a need to create a situation of encounter with a double of a lost ideal, so a pinax, and then too he has a bad case of twinfire, so he wishes to create a gemel, but, then, he is sabotaged by the artist who created for him a TINDTIRH being in a sort of swan song parody of the fact that in the way he and especially Alma, as if she was the ambassador of the neorococo late romantic culture, conceived of love and sex in the terms of the ideal love paradigm with roots in neorococo genre painting. This then means that this study of Hitler becomes a spin off of my long-term interest in how rococo culture was demonized over the modern period, where here is a case where demonic beings held idealistic values that paralyzed them, in the period of the Great War.
The further element of Rise of Evil (2003) that embarrasses is that, it really does buy into the modernist tabloid theory that the Nazis were evil because they were homosexuals and Hitler was evil because he was a repressed unsexed maniac idealist who if he would have had a regular sex life would not have wanted to kill everybody. In this movie, I have treated the silly treatment of his relationship with Helene, and as if to spike the ball further, to pick up another loose end, they pick up with his sick relationship with his 17-year-old niece Geli Rabaud. She is played in this version by a young Jenna Malone looking incredibly cute and every bit believable as the object of a crush by an older man. In various books, again Gest, maybe Simms, Putzi is quoted as saying that Hitler’s relationship with Eve Braun was shallow and diplomatic compared to his sick allover passion for Raubal. Fest assumes that they had a sexual affair. This movie will not go there, so makes Hitler undertake some incomprehensibly weird behavior, thus skirting to the edge of the issue, also mentioned, I forget by whom, maybe again Putzi, that Hitler indulged in really abhorrent sexual perversions with her, he does the whole great man seduction.
artiste
the “wonder of you” phase, but then, keeping it in the fields, he does this weird thing where he wants her to circle around him.
a lot, faster, strange
faster, stranger
then there is jealousy? Of Hitler?
In all cases, my method is, I read a written source, and see how the scene is visualized in my mind, then make a scirpograph in the catastrophist mode of that, then compare that, presumably with accurate psychodynamics, with how it is imagined elsewhere. By this method, it is demonstrated that many people who live in time in fact live outside of the times, detoured into a cul de sac of the past, to have a baleful influence on the times. No such counter-zeit geist is more interesting in his failure of this sort than Ernst Hanfstaengl, Hitler’s piano player.
rmarts 