David Moore has posted an exhilarating and deeply probing essay about Lost Knowledge of the Imagination on his Ritual in the Dark web site. I met David last year at the Colin Wilson Conference held at Nottingham University, where he gave a brilliant talk on the links between Wilson’s ‘new existentialism’ and his investigations into the occult, as evidenced in Wilson’s novels The Mind Parasites and The Philosopher’s Stone, and I am happy to see that he will be speaking again at next year’s conference. I also understand that Colin Stanley’s Paupers Press will be publishing a collection of his essays sometime in the near future. I hope that future is very near, as I look forward to reading more of, well, Moore’s work - due credit to the god of unintentional puns given. It is encouraging and heartening to see new minds taking up the Wilsonian banner, and if it is simply not done for a writer to applaud an essay about his own work, then I accept the calumny such action entails. Diffidence be damned: it is a fine piece of writing.
Tag: Stan Gooch
Remarkable Men, the Fin De Siecle and Zombies
Penguin Classics has put out a new edition of Gurdjieff’s Meetings With Remarkable Men to which I’ve contributed an Introduction. The book was an important influence on me in my early years and remains the most readable thing Gurdjieff wrote; while recognizing the importance of Beelzebub’s Tales to His Grandson, readers of that unwieldy masterpiece will, I think, agree. So not surprisingly I am very happy to be introducing this gripping esoteric adventure story to a new generation, and perhaps reminding an older one just how remarkable both Gurdjieff and his spiritual autobiography are. (I’m not sure when or if it will be available in the US; amazon.co.uk have it listed as a Kindle edition, but the paperback should be available after February 5.) I have also contributed an essay, “New Age Fin De Siecle” to an impressive tome, The Fin-De-Siecle World, published by Routledge and edited by Michael Saler, a professor of history at UC Davis. I argue that along with its stereotyped character as a era of decadence, the fin-de-siecle also had a very positive, progressive side, in which mysticism, science, the occult, and quite a few other things came together in a remarkable blend, and that practically everything associated with today’s “new age” can be traced back to it. Some idea of the essay can be found in an earlier post “The Spirit at the Turn of the 20th Century,” which readers can find below. I’ve also contributed entries on C.G. Jung, Stan Gooch (an important paranormal investigator and theorist on human evolution) and Colin Wilson to another door-stopping work, Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics: The Paranormal from Alchemy to Zombies, edited by Matt Cardin, which will available later this year. I hope that anyone who hasn’t read Meetings With Remarkable Men may be encouraged to give it a try, and that readers familiar with it may feel its time for a new copy. The Fin-De-Siecle World and Ghosts, Spirits and Psychics, on the other hand, are massive academic works, and are priced beyond most readers’ budgets. But perhaps your local library or institute of higher education could be persuaded to add them to their collection. (By the way, I get no royalties from any sales, so this isn’t a plug to help pay my rent.)
Gary Lachman 