In August 2014 I read Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures and Simon
Reynolds Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past,
back-to-back and was tremendously inspired, finding all manner of cultural
memories stirring and being re-fashioned at a rapid rate. I had just got some simple
video software having decided it was way past time to get some footage of my
lectures online. Whilst tinkering about with it a most satisfying creative
process followed that allowed me to express something of what I termed a
Hauntological Reverie.
I sat with the result for some time. When writing
what became my Glastonbury
Psychogeography in 2016, the initial intention was to include some material
on Hauntology that could also serve as an accompanying piece to the video. By
this time I had adopted the strategy of back-engineering books in order to
launch them at conferences and lectures and ran out of time so that little
section was never completed. I have now felt the need to finish what I started.
Hauntology bears some comparison with Psychogeography
inasmuch as, firstly, they are both terms that originated in France but were
then significantly re-visioned in Britain. The term was used by French
post-modernist theorist Jacques Derrida in his 1994 book Spectres of Marx. It arose from the context of a time when Soviet
Russia had dissolved and it was being proclaimed that communism had died. The
American Francis Fukuyama had recently written The End of History, a widely publicised supremely contentious
assertion that liberal capitalism had now definitively triumphed as it was the unchallengeable
best way to make the world work. Derrida wrote of how Marx somehow persisted as
both a presence and absence thus creating for him a strange status that
required a new way of thinking to accommodate.
Once the concept was established it soon becomes
clear that ‘persistence through memory that is mutated through absence’ is a
theme that can be remarkably wide-ranging and fruitful. The absence of a future
we once felt might happen leads to widespread cultural retrospectives. Some
have argued that the majority of our culture now consists of cycles of Retro
and rehash, mash-ups and genre blending. This can all be studied as a unity
within the concept of Hauntology. We are remaking our memories and aspirations.
When this becomes conscious and deliberate we have a new force in culture.
Nostalgia becomes creative.
One of the most powerful forms of such experimentation
can come through music. Some artists are deliberately using old recording
technology and instruments, incorporating fragments of old TV series, movies, advertisements
and so on, to create a mutated memory. It was hearing some of this music that
inspired my Hauntological video foray.
The philosophy and methodology of the Ghost Box label was immensely inspiring
to me. The name itself is an evocative reference to television sets and their
peculiar powers. They describe themselves on their website as ‘a
record label for a group of artists exploring the misremembered musical history
of a parallel world. A world of TV soundtracks, vintage electronics, folk
song, psychedelia, ghostly pop, supernatural stories, and folklore.’’
Running through all this is the potent enchantment
of a kind of false memory, a nostalgia for a past that has been wrongly
remembered and also yearned for, even when aspects of it are disturbing. A
re-visioning and re-inventing of the past is the great creative endeavour.
Somewhere in all this I sense a feeling that the landscape and the memory dream
that hangs in the airwaves through dreams and the moods of particular locales
somehow involves itself in that endeavour, that something wants this adjustment
in favour of a mysterious emotional nuance to occur.
Co-owner, composer and producer Jim Jupp stated that
their nostalgia focus is “a particular
period of time in British history--more or less 1958-1978. All this might be
tied up with a special kind of national identity, nothing at all to do with
jingoism, flags, sports, borders, anthems.” Having been born in 1959 and
made my first visit to the Stonehenge and Glastonbury Festivals in 1979 to then
watch the John Mills dystopian Quatermass, an apparent expression of the dark
side of the dream in the early months of the Thatcher era, this lands very
strongly with me.
The founders of Ghost Box Jim Jupp and Julian House
grew up in South Wales. As teenagers they frequented Caerleon-on-Usk, a potent
location full of history and mythology. It was also the birthplace of Arthur
Machen, cult horror writer best known for The
Great God Pan, an influence on HP Lovecraft. Machen eloquently evoked a
compelling, haunted, often dangerous, landscape. This influence permeates Ghost
Box as does much other horror from both literature and movies. Some Ghost Box
offerings feature the spoken word or have written texts accompanying their
packaging, ranging from short stories to seventies mock-up documentary items.
Perhaps the most over-riding meta-nostalgia that
unites the disparate material is a lost utopianism. The sixties saw the
building in Britain of new housing estates and shopping centres, of high-rise
blocks of flats, as a part of a huge programme to make good sites still bomb
damaged from the war and replace homes considered to be slums. It seemed part
of a vast social transformation that had begun with the welfare state and would
assuredly make a better world that the TV shows and comics I consumed portrayed
as a gleaming high-tec paradise where flying cars and moon bases would be sure
to follow.
Of course this promise was not fulfilled. The
seventies ultimately seem in retrospect to have been a grim strange decade.
Things got dystopian at a rapid rate. The new estates and tower blocks
destroyed communities and bred alienation, soon seeming to be slums as well. It
was the landscape that provided a strange counter-expression of the times.
I have long felt that occultism, UFOlogy and Earth Mysteries,
folklore and the hippie mysticism of leylines and so on were part of one
spectrum and I was enthralled by the controversial research John Keel and
Jacques Vallee who produced great work son this unity. In this video I
playfully express that unity with a nod to the importance of the rock music of
the time in helping this feeling with glimpses of Glastonbury Fayre and Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page in a fantasy
sequence form the band’s The Song Remains
the Same movie filmed in the grounds of Aleister Crowley’s old home on the
shores of Loch Ness. I had got plenty of mileage from investigating the Crowley
Loch Ness interface in my book Aleister
Crowley and the Aeon of Horus and my first filmed lecture was drawn from
this in September 2014.
This is my lost future, sourced from UK
material. I wanted the dynamism of this
extraordinary blend to literally transform our sense of reality. It is grasped
by the psychic prodigies the Tomorrow People,
a British kids TV X Men. Evolutionary
mutants will interact with the great mystery, safeguard us from its possible
hazards, and eventually the whole human race will follow. Perhaps help from external sources is
available as well. Dr Who feeds that.
And those hazards There’s an edginess concerning
what is really being confronted and where that might lead. Ancient devils might
be the masks of malevolent aliens. Perhaps our potential is just being
harvested and our ley pilgrimages to ancient sites will end like the 1979
Quatermas story with absorption into a beam of light that represents
annihilation rather than ascension and redemption. This is our collective test
of fear and resolve. A confrontation with a Dweller on the Threshold. It’s a selective
variant version of a past that haunts my present, still seeking to transform
the future.
I had a distinctive personal immersion in Hauntological
themes when writing my book The
Glastonbury Zodiac and Earth Mysteries UFOlogy. The centre of gravity of
the work concerned the previously unpublished 1969 UFO experience of author
Anthony Roberts and his wife Jan. It led to a download that set Roberts off on
a wild writing process dealing with ancient astronaut theories filtered through
pulp science fiction and fantasy. As a Glastonbury enthusiast he was enamoured
of the belief in the existence of a huge landscape zodiac shaped from a mix of
topographical features. A popular idea in the sixties and seventies, it had no
archaeology to back it up. Roberts took proposed dating back thousands of years
and claimed it was an Atlantean relic created with help from ETS. However crazy
this might sound, I have long felt a peculiar beauty and potency, a certain
poetry in this kind of blend. It was the very epitome of British psychedelic
Earth Mysteries UFOlogy.
The enormous manuscript that resulted, provisionally
entitled Giants in the Earth, was
never finished. In 2013 I became the first person outside of the Roberts
household to read it in 40 years, Tony having died in 1990. Looking into the
work and the influences it drew on made me realise that the inspiration of
Earth Mysteries UFOlogy on the development of Glastonbury as modern mystical
capital of Britain was far stronger than many might realise. It undoubtedly lay
behind Robert’s creation and editing of the mid-seventies anthology Glastonbury: Ancient Avalon, New Jerusalem,
perhaps the most widely circulated work on the mystical aspects of the place in
terms of ley lines, terrestrial zodiacs, and so on.
I wondered what it would have been like if the book
had been completed and published in 1971 when the initial writing inspiration
abated? It could have sat alongside a large number of pulp paperbacks of the
time and become part of a certain climate of thought. The ideas it contained
would have become part of the fabric of seventies Glastonbury as shops like Gothic Image opened and began to
establish the emerging modern identity of the town. Roberts was quite closely
associated with the shop and if his book had been published it would assuredly
have been on sale there alongside the anthology and found its way out as part
of an expression of the blend of the time. I had a sense of a cover that would
contain visual aspects of the ancient astronaut paperback art of the time. I
even entertained the wild idea of publishing it. I knew that Yuri Leitch, who
has been responsible for the cover art I have designed for my books could
produce a superb homage in that style, perhaps featuring a classic Adamski
Flying Saucer above Glastonbury Tor? Pages from the text were scanned. It would
be a colossal task involving huge editing. It would cost a lot of money. In
standard paperback size it would run to around 500 pages. The number of sales
would be extremely limited. I ran out of money and it never happened.
My interest in Hauntology helped me to realise that
this episode featured many familiar themes. The existence of this text in a
kind of hyperspace represented an enhancement of an existing cultural trend.
Glastonbury has had its share of UFO and Atlantean enthusiasts. This work
though, by a man who was a passionate Avalonian, who had actually died of a
heart attack on Glastonbury Tor, was the direct result of a UFO experience at
the end of the mythic sixties. If this combination had rippled out into the
headspace of Glastonbury pilgrims who might have bought the book in Gothic Image in the seventies and into
the eighties then an infinite number of adjusted nuances were possible. This
was a tantalising lost future that was not just an imaginative recreation. The
text was real and inspired by something perplexing. All of this is part of the
alchemy that led to me wanting to create my Hauntological
Reverie video.
Immersed in the work as I was, and launching my book
at the always cosmically expansive Glastonbury Symposium in July 2015, I felt
that something of those nuances were strongly active in me and, even though I
had not managed to publish the original text, I was helping that buried
dreamlike current to break the surface. It was an uncanny feeling and helped
along by my repeated listening to the 1976 prog-rock instrumental album In Search of Ancient Gods by Absolute
Elsewhere during the writing of the book. I’d still like to see a 1971 retro
version of Tony Roberts Giants in the
Earth manifest and in doing so lead us to feel it had always been here
somehow since that date.
As for my video,
A Pilgrims Path from the album The Belbury
Tales by Belbury Poly (a Ghost Box Jim Jupp project) really evoked the
blend for me that had stirred in my readings and reveries. Images I rapidly
gathered seemed to easily cohere with it. The name Belbury was taken from a fictional
location featured in the CS Lewis novel That
Hideous Strength, a work stuffed to bursting point with many of the coming
decades’ motifs in terms of awakening landscape mysticism and opposing dark
forces that constitute a kind of techno-demonism. I know the video is very much
an amateur production but I hope it is enjoyable and conveys at least a little
something of the feelings that inspired it.
