FORBIDDEN FRUIT

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"I am seeking a distant point at the origin of creation; where I sense a single formula for … all the forces surrounding us." Paul Klee

44 Chapter 25

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chapter25

VOID ( SOLID (SOLID ) )

POINT ( VOID (VOID ) )

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“Until now, tyranny has merely changed hands. In their common respect for rulers, antagonistic powers have always fostered the seeds of their future coexistence. Unresolved antagonisms fester, hiding real contradictions. Decompression is the permanent control of both antagonists by the ruling class. The third force radicalises contradictions and leads to their supersession, in the name of individual freedom and against all forms of constraint. Power has no option but to smash or incorporate the third force without admitting its existence.”
Raoul Vaneigem Decompression and the Third Force

I have carried these drawings around with me since the 1970’s. Were it not for the advent of the personal computer and the subsequent revolution of the internet I would have no doubt carried them to my grave.

Their origin came as a flash of lightning in the course of an unwanted tarot card reading whilst high on LSD. At the time I was living behind barricades in a squatted street in Brixton, South London. As the cards were being laid out my attention was immediately drawn to the pattern of the layout rather than the cards themselves. The two trees with their spiralling lines of energy linking heaven to earth, the missing sepheroth of ‘daat’ and the advice to think of the two trees as one, were taken as instructions for interpreting the movement of the layout, for bringing its message into focus.

After the reading it took me no more than a few moments to sketch out the simple steps that transformed the Holy Cabbalah into a strand of DNA. It was so absurdly obvious it made me laugh with delight. Here was the perfect mnemonic for everything I took to be true. The positive and negative strands and a third missing but implied within the ‘space between’, it spoke of the physicists positrons, electrons and neutrons, of Hegel’s thesis, antithesis and synthesis, the binary tree of positive and negative points emerging from a fulcrum of no specification. In short it struck me as a law of nature, somehow sacred to the operation of reality.

“There is no god but man.

Man has the right to live by his own law – to live in the way that he wills to do: to work as he will: to play as he will: to rest as he will: to die when and how he will.

Man has the right to eat what he will: to drink what he will: to dwell where he will: to move as he will on the face of the earth.

Man has the right to think what he will: to speak what he will: to write what he will: to draw, paint, carve, etch, mold, build as he will: to dress as he will.

Man has the right to love as he will.

Man has the right to kill those who thwart these rights.”
The Equinox: A Journal of Scientific Illuminism, 1922 Edited by Aleister Crowley

So …. I began to show friends my piece of paper with its rough geometrical sketches – the Holy Cabbalah and the gene, ‘secrets of life’ coincident in both meaning and depiction and the general response was underwhelming. One person however remarked that they had seen it in a book somewhere but couldn’t remember which one or where that might have been. So I began to trawl bookshops in the forlorn hope of finding this confirmation of my discovery. Surely I’m not the first to have seen this relationship? The result was numerous hints suggesting a link but nothing overt and to the point. Just two years ago in one bookshop I found two books – ‘The Tao and The Tree of Life – Alchemical and Sexual Mysteries of the East and West and ‘Tao of Chaos – DNA and the I Ching, Unlocking the Code of the Universe – sitting side by side, together on the same shelf. The secret remains a secret not because it isn’t been told, many times over, but because the eye doesn’t see what is being revealed.

So …. I tried redrawing the work on graph paper. Added colour and form. Worked the process backwards to show the origins of the Cabbalah in an underlying binary progression, itself mapped upon the notions of dimensional increase. I took the same process and pushed it forwards and out came a strand of DNA either replicating or manifesting the third strand of RNA. With every exploration I tried various routes to portray the mechanism being applied. The images may have varied but the results always remained the same. I became convinced that there was nothing arbitrary about my procedures.

Over the years I have continued to show my work as the opportunity arises. The keenest advocates are the young. Their minds allow them them to skim through the drawings, from beginning to end, without the need for an explanation as to what they might mean. Older people somehow trip themselves up after just a few pages, unable to continue they resort to critical disbelief as they demand of me the verbal key to what is laid out before them. A few rare individuals see it for what it is, even guess what is coming before the page is turned. We might disagree about the explanation but the work itself points to an objective phenomenon, mutually recognised as existing outside of the drawings and interpretation.

Perhaps the hardest part of the story to convey is the sense of subversion, the circumvention of conventions, that requires students of the Cabbalah to fear its revelation as a mundane molecule of DNA, for students of modern science to ridicule the assertion that ancient esoteric knowledge might contain objective truthes. Even the problem of whether this work is art or science, fact or fiction, defies categorisation. In terms of religion I have no desire to become a prophet or teacher. Ideally I would like to remain anonomous. My inclinations might lean towards Taoism and Zen but only because I see them as paths of liberation designed to transcend the normal codified restrictions of mainstream religious practices. Likewise politically. I despise ideology as the reification of practice into theory. Hence my sympathies for anarcho-syndicalist, community-based social experimentation and the tactics of detournement used by the situationists. As far as science goes I find intense satisfaction from the conclusions of quantum mechanics, chaos theory and the likes of Rupert Sheldrake with his speculation on the existance of a morphogenic field.

I believe myself to be part of a community that in time will spread out to include everyone else. From a chance event over twenty years ago I found myself offered a piece of information that would further the project. On completing these words I will have finally fulfilled my obligations to that gift from the unknown and unknowable. Now it is your turn to do what you will with it. I don’t possess this work any more than you do.

“Radical theory belongs to those who improve upon it.”
Raoul Vaneigem A Reversal of Perspective

Nevertheless the long fuse of history is reaching its climax. The Sumerian project of bringing heaven to earth and making of our world a garden fit for the gods to walk in, continues unabated. All that is required is a consciousness of the need to take this project seriously, for it to re-emerge into the light of day and defeat those who would suppress its appearance. The alternative, as the Sumerian demise clearly shows us, is social catastrophe and a descent into barbarism and ignorance. Only this time it is the fate of the planet itself that is at stake. So what have we to lose but to go for transcendance? And what that might mean is as real as any of us might wish to make it.

“Utterly impossible as are all these events they are probably as like those which may have taken place as any others which never took person at all are ever likely to be.”
James Joyce Finnegans Wake

Time is two dimensional maybe even three.

“We have yet to see the “Bible of the Goddess” written for modern times. We have suggested that it should come from mental processes that are more akin to the creativity of the artists than to the reductionisms of science. We believe that the polarisation between science and art is unnecessary and is likely to prove deadly. All the testimony shows that the creative process of discovery is the same process in both science and art. Perhaps our next evolutionary step as a species might be to develop a “science of the imagination” that does not neglect the inner life. If we do not, then it is likely that we shall perish.

“It is acknowledged that the process which leads to discovery in science and to the creation of new works of art involves a creative surrender and a rhythm. No artist, no scientist, no poet can make his works by a deliberate act of will: he has to accumulate insights and data with his conscious mind, and then he knows he has to forget the “I”, the “ego”, to forget his pre-conceived ideas, and to allow the more “unreasonable” and ancient aspects of the mind to find the pattern to his material. There is a descent, and a return, with the knowledge and prize of inner riches.”
Penelope Shuttle and Peter Redgrave The Wise Wound: Eves Curse and Everywoman

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