On "Fixing" Poetry - the Correction Collection

[N0T 2]

I have noticed over the years a distinct tradition of commentators presenting their own writings as "correcting" the writings of Kenneth Grant and others working in similar areas of subjectively-driven poesis stimulated by traditional occult/cult material.

Whether published in books, magazines, or internet forums, these "criticisms" seem to usually come with the assumption that there is an orthodoxy from which Grant's work deviates, whether that orthodoxy be entirely fabricated (i.e. Crowley's writings, themselves a deviation from the writings of Mathers, themselves an amalgam of ideas by his predecessors based on his own subjective experiences with that material) or some kind of philological, historical reality as currently understood by tenured academics with contracts to secure.

The standard formula appears to be, 1. find a bit of "wierd" Grant writing (simultaneously his main attraction and the easiest target, being designed as it is to outrage the dogs of reason, hopefully to wake them up), and 2. apply the inapplicable critiques currently floating about in one's ego, arguably an even wierder angle than that presented by his work, but no doubt with good intentions behind it.

Whenever it appears, my personal reaction to this tendency has always been mystification and bafflement, akin to witnessing a friend pronounce a critique upon that afternoon's sunset as not quite what he'd expected, or someone being annoyed that a flower had the "wrong" number of petals. Or being appalled by a platypus. Much in the way Darwin was appalled, increasingly, by the wierdness of the natural world he was endeavouring to discover.

Typical areas of this battlefield, otherwise known as love, are:

        - Grant's gematria

        - Grant's published application of colour scales, invented in the 19th century by Moina Mathers, to the Liber 231 sigils, in Nightside of Eden

        - Grant's application of (arbitrary) musical keys to the cells of the above

        - Grant's use of historical stimulus material as a basis for epic riffage along poetic-mythopaeic-cabalistic lines, following the tradition of Blavatsky, Mathers, Crowley, Massey, etc., rather than as literal philological pronouncements about externalities, intended to die in academic texts

        - Grant's interpretation of the XI O.T.O. (insofar as it ever existed as a thing to be "interpreted", having been invented as part of a conceptual notion of degrees by Crowley, a poet, to gratify his pretensions to an elitist homosexual rank - an unfortunate inverse result of the repression of his day)

        - Grant's interest in UFOlogy

        - Grant's interest in the Dogon tribe's occult wisdom regarding Sirius star system, viewed poetically as resonating with inner plane realities of Western occultism

        - Grant's anecdotal records of lodge workings in all their supernatural splendour, which aren't even remotely far-fetched to anyone who has actually achieved anything positive or negative in the field of magick

I thought it worthwhile to start this thread as a way of collecting these areas of correction - for our own good, as their killjoy rationalist authors would have it, or simply to enjoy in their own misguided* weirdness.

[merlin]

A very interesting and thought provoking thread indeed, NOT 2. A common "correction" that I heard over the years is Grant taking Lovecraft's Chtulhu mythos and the Necronomicon as real rather than fiction, as Lovecraft intended them.

[N0T 2]

Feb 10, 2018 13:00:59 GMT merlin said:

A very interesting and thought provoking thread indeed, NOT 2. A common "correction" that I heard over the years is Grant taking Lovecraft's Chtulhu mythos and the Necronomicon as real rather than fiction, as Lovecraft intended them.

Grant points out that fiction, as myth, deals with reality in a general sense. Which is why we can read it and still be affected, enlightened, inspired, etc.. despite its lack of literal reality. Which is why Lovecraft, inspired by some of the same sources as Blavatsky, including Blavatsky, but also including the facts of the world around him, and within him (in the mystic sense of having profound or radical shifts of consciousness from the ego's perspective, which is basically what his fiction deals with, making it belong entirely to the world of spiritual and occult literature, rather than just fiction), can produce works that transmit real glimpses of spiritual matters using equally preposterous content. The entire Golden Dawn system was made up by Mathers from glosses of medieval material, Egyptological fantasy/poesis and his own mind's best go at articulating the inarticulable with every tool in the shed. Crowley grew up in that and added his own, Lovecraft learned supernatural scifi horror, the language he had cultural access to, and was embedded within. It's a non-issue, except for the thickest. On first reading, I had an issue with the detail of Grant's specific interpretations, simply because I'd felt them differently myself, but as the same was true of some of Grant's other analysis (of Crowley for example) I realised that this was always going to be the case, that a quality of strange or alienness was inevitable when such intimate and refined essences are being communicated or explored in language.

When I first encountered and read Grant, Lovecraft was already an old friend whose perspective and vision seemed to make a great deal of sense. I could already see how there was material in Lovecraft's fiction that was simply the best way he knew to express or process insights for which his culture had no other acceptable vehicle or format, Christianity having seen to that. His ego was nailed to his ideas of culture, and the same rationalism that yielded his existential madness also bore a shadow rich with irrational influences that have stood the test of time better than the science of his day has. Aspects of it, the Randolph Carter cycle for example, resound with ideas of consciousness and reality that Buddhists and Hindus and Theosophists (whose work Crowley purported to propagate) would not find unfamiliar at all, merely shrouded in cultural cloth of a different cut. If fiction is good enough, it will be realer than everything else.

Grant wasn't the only nor the first to recognise Lovecraft's work as containing occult insights, Nevill Drury, Rosaleen Norton, Austin Spare all had done this before Grant's books appeared, but he was the first to really nut it out his way (without him ever insisting that his way was the only way, rather, demonstrating what someone doing it their way looks like) and publish extensively on the area.