I Chose To Believe

Eisenhower Eats

Ike's great-granddaughter recommends a diet not far removed from Cathar or Vedic practice to facilitate contact with sky beings.

This could prompt us to reflect deeply on the mysterious resonances between religious revelations spanning the centuries, or perhaps to enjoy an amusing piece of fluffy journalism with a condescending smirk on our smug faces.

Sun Ra: Showman or Shaman?

Dreams come true, I know they do
If you believe in love
Mine came true and yours will too
I swear by the stars above

Dreams come true, they just have to
True as the Sun above
Mine came true and yours will too 
If you believe in love

Dream of romance
Strolling down Lover's Lane
In a trance
And dream it over again

Dreams come true, they just have to
To prove they're so supreme
Mine came true and yours will too 
All you have to do is dream

-"Dreams Come True," Sun Ra 

~~~

Sonny had a vision.  His body was transfigured.  Up he went, and down to a stage on Saturn.  They told him to leave school, to speak through his music.  The world was due to become a more chaotic place, and there would be trouble in the schools, but music was a language that would be heard.

Ten years later, in 1947, people began to talk about flying saucers.  Sonny was always ahead of the curve, but now his private epiphany had some kind of cultural currency.

~~~

Ten years after that, Herman Poole Blount had become Le Sony'r Ra.  He had an independent music label, El Saturn Records, and a big band, the Arkestra.  With his manager and various associates and pen pals, he traded books and ideas about symbols and religion, ancient times and extraterrestrial encounters.  Strange packages would arrive from corners unknown, holding secrets and clues.  Long before the Internet, the esoterica of the day all got funneled through Sun Ra, listening to Long John Nebel on the radio when he wasn't writing and rehearsing.

His band were affordably dressed as Egyptians and space men, a silly expression of serious preoccupations of the bandleader. The costumes also helped to undercut the self-conscious rigour of the music.

Sonny was intense about discipline.  When his band moved to New York and the music moved further into the avant-garde, he rejected the label of "free jazz."  There was nothing free about it; this was music about mind and cosmos.  This was space jazz.

~~~

It would be another twenty years before the zeitgeist was ready, and George Clinton produced a flying saucer funk that approximated Sun Ra's aesthetic.  Outside of a rewarding cross-pollination that resulted in a series of approachable fusion albums, Ra's music remained a more dangerous, uncanny animal.  It was not uncommon for a show to begin with a twenty-minute expression of the creation of the universe as explained by a wall of horns, or end with Ra snaking through the crowd and shouting in people's faces.  This was music to change minds.

~~~

He is said to be a pioneer of Afrofuturism, and early on he closely identified with Black struggles.  As time went on, he came to see blacks and whites alike as subject to the lies and illusions of a nefarious archontic power using us as pawns for its own amusement.

In some combination of inspired revelation, divine disclosure, informed intuition, and self-mythologising bullshit, Sonny told people that he was a member of the angel race.

~~~

He never changed his story about the time he went to Saturn, but no one saw him dissolve.  The historicity of his prehistoric alien abduction is a moot point.  It can be judged only in its possible effects.

Sun Ra pioneered the use of electronic keyboards and free improvisation in jazz, but that proves nothing.  He was one of the most prolific recording artists of his century, but that proves nothing.  He lived and breathed his music, living in a big house with his band and catnapping at the piano, but that proves nothing.

What might actually mean something is that today, twenty-three years after the man's transition, the Sun Ra Arkestra still tours in his name.  Ninety-something Marshall Allen dresses as a wizard, blows an electronic whistle, and the band sings the old songs.  The crowd and the performers enter a magical space in which a dead man is still alive.  They dream of the future, of the boundlessness of infinity, of love in outer space.  This is perhaps the greatest proof that Sonny was touched by something, reaching down to make a prophet of a man.

He warned of doom in the grand old tradition, but he used his every day on Earth to wake people up where he could.  That he did so without arousing much recognition from the jazz or the flying saucer communities suggests he was right about that evil unseen force of injustice in the world.

~~~

They plan to leave this world one day
In sundry rocket ships to sail away

They plan to go to somewhere there
In splendid ships of models rare

They plan to find another place in the sky
Without saying farewell, without saying goodbye

They plan to put the White House on the Moon, soon
And the Kremlin on a satellite

-"They Plan to Leave," Sun Ra

~~~

Further reading

Nutella rejects personalised jar for five-year-old girl named Isis

Ms Taylor said she would not be in favour of putting the name "Hitler" on a jar of Nutella, but her case was different because she named her daughter before the rise of Islamic State, she said. She also has no intention of changing her daughter's name, and argues the name Isis needed to be reclaimed.

ET Go Home: Let’s Retire The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis

"Presumptions have kept us locked in a vicious circle because most of us don’t even realize that we’re in it. It would be nice to crack this circle so that we can move into the larger world of logic, interesting ideas and fun speculation. We might even begin to meet the phenomenon of UFOs more on its own terms (or at least without us getting in our own way.)"

Down the Rabbit Hole: Curiouser and Curiouser

"The study of strange phenomena, which so often finds itself arrayed against an imagined monolith of science, might justifiably consider itself a manifestation of a seemingly oxymoronic 'post-modern' science, the application of reason to the breakdown of ideological containment, in this instance the ideology of the real."

Research findings back up Aboriginal legend on origin of Central Australian palm trees

"The concordance of the findings of a scientific study and an ancient myth is a striking example of how traditional ecological knowledge can inform and enhance scientific research."

Real-Life Vampires Exist, and Researchers Are Studying Them

"What was perhaps most surprising about the vampires I met though was their marked lack of knowledge about vampires in popular culture. They seemed to know much less than you might expect – at least for vampires – about how their kind were depicted in books and films. By this I mean to say that the people I met with and interviewed hadn’t turned to drinking blood or taking psychic energy simply because they had read too many Anne Rice novels."

When Things Happen That You Can't Explain

"I’ve talked to hundreds of people who have had remarkable, unexpected experiences that startled them profoundly. Some see them as clear evidence of the supernatural and others do not. And there are those who come to a conclusive view of what these events mean, and those who hold them as evidence of the mystery of the human imagination itself."

Narrative and the New Nihilism

"This isn't an argument for that old time religion. I realize that we've reached the same point the Romans did when Jupiter no longer made sense. But I don't think Scientism is a viable replacement, especially given that it seems to be just a stop on the road to full-bore nihilism.

I realize we are one of those great turning points in history. But these are the times when empires fall. The media and the educational system - more totalitarian than any previous regime dreamed of being - has raised a generation with no loyalty to anything but its own reflection. To what end? I don't think that's truly been thought through."

Funerals are being held for robotic dogs in Japan because owners believe they have souls

"'I was thrilled over the interesting mismatch of giving cutting-edge technology a memorial service in a very conventional manner,' he said.

It is a mismatch that humans will probably become more used to over the coming years and decades, as robots with 'personalities' become ever more part of our lives."

'Fairy control' to halt tiny doors in Somerset woods

"We've got little doors everywhere. We're not anti-fairies but it's in danger of getting out of control."

Working Class Monster: How Folklore Became a Class Signifier

"The modern way in which we control social status is through the control of information.  Our technocratic elites are those with a mastery of technology and technique, and thus the arbiters of 'real' information.  This has extended into the world of the Fortean, where the greater accessibility of a wide variety of folklore that might once have been communicated in oral traditions are now available at the click of a button, and thus the technocratic underclass, always suspected of gullibility, superstition, and increased susceptibility to the power of suggestion, can be safely characterized as genuine but unwitting dupes, rather than witnesses or informants, just as the Marxist theologians celebrated the authenticity of the proletariat, while simultaneously pointing out that the ignorant masses did not understand their own alienation from the means of production, and thus allowed themselves to be oppressed by robber barons."

The Myth of the Creative Genius

"In Mozart's real letters to his family, he revealed that he revised his compositions, sometimes got stuck, needed a piano and harpsichord to compose, left and returned to his work, and contemplated theory, craft, melody and rhythm when composing."

"So here is still more evidence of the plasticity of the brain, and its ability to adapt to new habits, new skills, and new information. Start doing the work, and the brain responds, allowing one to build and retain not just technical knowledge, but also the imaginative capacity needed to utilize it fully."

What makes an urban legend?

"Norenzayan’s analysis of Grimm's fairy tales found that the most popular stories – as measured by the number of times they have been cited online – only have two or three supernatural surprises. Our brains, it seems, have only so much room for the bizarre before it becomes too confusing to be enjoyable."

The Most Dangerous Ideas In Science

"High-energy physicist Sabine Hossenfelder called Dawid's kind of post-empirical science an 'oxymoron.'  More importantly, for scientists like Paul Steinhardt and collaborators, the new ideas are becoming 'post-modern.' They use the term in the sense that without more definitive connections to data, the ideas will not be abandoned because a community exists that continues to support them."

People can be convinced they committed a crime that never happened

Research published in Psychological Science suggests that three out of four people can be encouraged to form false memories of an event that didn't occur.  A key ingredient in this process is softening the person up with accurate details and memories interspersed with the false.

This is very relevant to law and justice, where witnesses are understood to be prone to error.  The experimental protocol included faulty memory-recovery techniques, now demonstrated to have a deleterious effect on accurate recall.  Minimising the use of these fallible reconstructive modes of recollection in the interview setting would help avoid the creation of imagined events.

Although the study can only be strictly applied to individuals being coached by individuals, the theory that the inclusion of true facts made false ones appear more plausible could have a wider relevance to the dominant historical narrative of society; if true-seeming events can be patched together with enough pieces of truth, then why not values?  This effect could conceivably descend all the way to founding myths, past lives, or original sin.

‘Boy Who Came Back From Heaven’ going back to publisher

"I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention. When I made the claims that I did, I had never read the Bible."

From pygmies to hipsters, scientists find music really is universal

Pygmies living without electricity respond to calming or exciting music similarly to people in downtown Montreal.  Where the two groups differed was in their range of emotional response.

The Mbenzélé use music to purge negative emotions, so they consistently derive a positive feeling from hearing any music, while the Western tradition by contrast encourages a certain degree of wallowing in negative feelings.

This permits a greater range of artistic expression, but what are the social consequences of music built on anxiety, anger, apathy, or heartbreak?  Tempo and timbre activate a physiological response in the listener, but where that energy goes is determined by quite different factors.

Return of the fairy-hunters

"You might laugh it off, but the man was deadly serious — as are his informants. Well into the 21st century, beneath the radar of a popular culture obsessed with vampires and aliens, elements of traditional British folklore have inexplicably survived."