Book Review

Objectivity Means You Have Not Done What You Have Just Done

A review of Eugenia Macer-Story's The Pulse of the Dragon

by Colin Bennett

1. The Cartesian Control System

This is a book about the lost power of subjectivity. As such it travels the royal road of traditional magic. Magic is what it always has been: it is an expression based on the assumption that is might be possible to locate and use forces within  Mind (group or individual) in order to  transform the world in defiance of the established "facts" of formal scientific observation.  All so-called occultism is deeply political in that it disrupts the flat Cartesian control-signal of so-called mechanical  "objectivity." Once the cultural control-signals are sabotaged, disrupted, or denied, we have access to limitless chattering sub-texts of experience whose structure and organisation is image-based rather then being linear, rational, or concrete (this latter being the most common metaphor used to beat existential consumers into cowed submission). In The Pulse of the Dragon we see Charles Fort's "banned" texts and events pouring out of cracks in the mangled Cartesian clockwork.

Without exception, all cultures are advertising systems. The ideas of the concrete and the real are maintained by powerful systems of ideological fabrication, using every trick of the commercial break to ensure that hypnotic rays of auto-generated propaganda hold all human attention. As both Orwell and Koestler told us long ago, semi-automated management of mass suggestion can switch us from channel to channel at will, until the entire scale of our experience is chosen for us by quasi-robotic viewing engines the size and complexity of which we are only just beginning to encounter. Passive viewers become mere image-processers in the supermarkets of ideologies. Big Science (as General Groves of Los Alamos called it) is just one more prime time Special Offer, with latter-day Mechanical rationalisations become merely updates within the cultural sales chatter.

In the Western world the great propaganda system of the past two hundred years was (and still is), some form of social-scientific Communism. In whatever form (left-liberal, social-democratic, Marxist), these systems (still plentifully described as “enlightened”), are still quite willing to beat an unbeliever to death until he or she becomes real, to use the Left’s favourite word. Orwell's Winston Smith, of 1984, is a living corpse, judged to be finally fit for the reality of proper scientifically-based consumer-socialization.

But like noises from old workings long thought abandoned, beneath the concrete we hear rumours that  life exists deep in the woods beyond the supermarket, the laboratory, and the viewing settee.

2. Pulse of the Dragon

Eugenia Macer-Story, the author of The Pulse of the Dragon, is an occultist. As such, she is a great hunter and collector of synchronicities; she judges form, shape, idea, and what the commercial breaks of science has reduced to mere "coincidences" or "chance." She ransacks Time, Space, and all History (no less) to reveal Personality and Idea (animal, vegetable, mineral) as live and evolving  structures, weaving through one another in a metaphysical dimension way beyond the mundane terms of finite vegetable life and death.

She does not discover the chattering sub-texts below the overt material world so much as she allows them to speak. When she gives them life, what do we see, what do we hear?

In this author’s hands, States, Empires, and whole and entire geographies become live animals, grazing on rich symbolic pastures. We hear stories of red-hatted fairy-tale elves seen in a basement; images are seen in trees, which appear to connect to patterns of cabalistic sorcery. Photographs and tape recorders of course show their usual misbehaviour. Imps and orbs appear, and the author herself is sometime almost transformed, as if the camera is seeing a person superimposed upon that of the image of the immediate subject. Sequences of stick-figures are found on postcards, in photographs, and indeed on the ground itself, such things  acting as if they were parts of a long-forgotten language. Once we unshackle the strict separations of fact versus fiction then we see a very different world-structure.

In this intermediate liminal world, the hard spines of differentiating mechanisms are transformed into systems of individual and cultural allowances, inputs and outputs being replaced by permissions and relationships. Thus is established a dialogue between Self, Image, and Symbol, a relationship largely lost to a Mankind controlled by the prime-time frames of rampant media-led consumerism.

To read the rest of this starry missive, click HERE