Rapid Eye 1: From Atavism To Zyklon B

By Simon Dwyer

RAPID EYE was the seminal British counter-culture journal founded in 1979 by journalist Simon Dwyer. Dwyer's classic RAPID EYE articles are now issued in three special ebook editions. Volume 1 includes an in-depth feature on Psychic TV and Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, additional texts by Genesis P-Orridge, a visit with legendary tattoo artist and body-piercer Mr. Sebastian, and a look at the workings of Brion Gysin's Dreamachine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elektron Ebooks
• Release date: Mar 4, 2015
• ISBN: 9781909923218

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RAPID EYE 1

BY SIMON DWYER

AN EBOOK

ISBN 978-1-909923-21-8

PUBLISHED BY ELEKTRON EBOOKS

COPYRIGHT 2013 ELEKTRON EBOOKS

www.elektron-ebooks.com

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a database or retrieval system, posted on any internet site, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Any such copyright infringement of this publication may result in civil prosecution

FOREWORD

Genesis P-Orridge

1.

I SPEAK FOR THOSE WHO LEFT

When I physically met Simon Dwyer he was robust, strong, clear-headed, perceptively intelligent, adamant; a knight apparent who charges forward with courageous folly and wins the errant day.

When I physically lost Simon he was slender and pliable; a zen master’s brush leaving a trail of feathery ink and precise markings soaking slowly into the surface fibres of carefully prepared paper. He won the day.

It is so easy to be seduced by the physical plane. Plain to sea.

Yet even as the material plane screams at us that it has substance, is strong and challenging, immovable, we, small clustered creatures of sensual fragility, see only the diaphanous surface. A gossamer thin film of colours and shadows that has settled over everything, giving it shape and implying solidity.

This process of believing in what we see, enables us to move around, get from place to place, avoid stumbling and bumping into each other. Such chance encounters being fraught with danger of many kinds; languages foreign to us, territorial disputes, posturing and snarling predators, cowering crowds of refugees. Noises stage right. Blue cones strobing warnings. Stage fright.

It would be easy to get lost in here, amongst the clashing billions of universes vying for attention as they build concrete memories of

2.

themselves. Trying to feel density. What you are becomes, quite literally, what you see. What you see becomes both a survival instinct and tool. Add to this maelstrom a sense of acceleration and spinning and navigation appears as hopelessly impossible as hesitation. Shoulders hunched against the sensory blizzard a formless stranger hustles by, swirling grey dust, mutters, Seeing is believing.

Seeing is a first step. We lurch forward into the data pollution.

Mad traffic hoping not to stumble on the curb. Relying, as we must, upon our belief that we are solid, that the asphalt is solid. That enough friction can occur to propel us effectively towards our destination. If our peripheral vision holds up. If our brains efficiently translate and filter screeching cars, filing them separately from screaming kids. If we dodge and weave. Act decisively and keep our gaze and intent firmly locked onto the objective. Taking into account variable conditions at the centre of this universe which is our individual being. Then, random chance willing, we will make it to our goal.

That which was blurred by the effect of distance will come into sharper and sharper focus. We’ve all seen these movies.

The screen shimmering, everything distorted and blurry. You can almost feel the sweat trickling. Your hand involuntarily twitches. This is so real that you went to wipe your brow for a split second. Gradually, ever so slowly, and without discernable patterns of any

3.

kind, the amoeboid shapes that have been so mysterious, so puzzling as they shaped, shifted, fragmented and reassembled languorously awaiting decoding based upon previous information, begin to solidify.

Suddenly, Pop! As if out of nowhere. All’s clear. The voices no longer muffled. The distractions gone. The unnecessary background noises disappear. No interference. Perfect definition. Frozen for a momeant. A pick-up truck in a Los Angeles heat haze.

Our hero stands alone. The child remains connected to a group mind until thinking creates separation. Our thoughts, not our manners, maketh man. Thinking, thinking alone, disconnects us from all others. Such a great loss occurs at the birth of individual thought that life can often become centred on the quest to return to the previous, connected state. To once more be a particle of a greater consciousness. To travel beyond the substantial into the very heart of compassion.

This journey is the hardest. Gone is the illusion that anything is fixed, or constant. The vines that shelter the arbour from illumination by the sun are arbitrary. For they too rely upon the light.

Our hero sits in contemplation. Sanctuary dissolving facing fear and the unknown in direct proportion to the increase in

4.

illumination as the vines lose materiality. At some point all is filled with this sameness made of light. Cell by cell. Space by space. All that was visible is visible equally and without surface.

Shoulders stretched, erect within the limitless vision a formless being hustles by, swirling, fluttering and whispers, Believing is seeing.

It is our great good fortune, seeded as a blessing through Simon’s acknowledgement of us, that really, nothing of significant spiritual or meta-physical value (which to me is, or should be, interchangeable with cultural value) is actually material.

All that survives outside the loops of time are words and images. That which, for no better reason than it happened, we call Art. Really though, not even Art survives. Ideas crystallised in the form of Art survive. Know not even that.

Ways of seeing. Waves of seeing. Positions from which to look. Perspective linking one frightened universe to another, creating a bridge of immortality. Knot mortal. A subjective point of reference. Luckily for us, for NOW!, the point at which Physics (the physical study) and Art (the metaphorical study) coincide. Perhaps collide.

It is my belief that Simon Dwyer understood that his conversations with each of us would occur because he wrote.

It is my boundless hope that you will come to treasure your interaction with them

5.

because words can speak differently to each individual.

Ending the unintended separation of our particular universes for a momeant. Easing our loneliness.

After you have lived with Simon in his universe for a time, please come back. Read this allegory once more.

—Genesis P-Orridge, NYC 1999.

FROM ATAVISM TO ZYKLON B

Genesis P-Orridge And The Temple Of Psychic Youth (From A To B And Back Again)

Western people often see obscenity where there is only symbolism.

—Sir John Woodroffe, Shakti & Shakta

Whoever wishes to be creative, must first destroy and smash accepted values.

—Nietzsche

‘Cults’ he said thoughtfully, examining a tape report grinding from the receptor. ‘What about cults?’ Sung-Wu asked faintly. ‘Any stable society is menaced by cults; our society is no exception. Certain lower strata are axiomatically dissatisfied. In secret they form fanatic, rebellious bands. They meet at night; they insidiously express inversions of accepted norms; they delight in flaunting basic mores and customs’.

—Philip K. Dick, The Turning Wheel

Social cohesion and individual liberty are in a state of permanent conflict or uneasy compromise. The result of this friction being a variety of cults, which fall like a veil of sparks, lighting the dark.

CRACK! Kathy Acker leaves the stage, her American brogue giving way to a whipping electronic beat that incessantly pounds the sweaty walls of a subterranean nightclub. A howl of wolves turns the beery air to frost. Necks tingle and hackles rise to the speeches of Hitler and JFK that spill from the speakers, the 23 TV screens on stage swim to life, forming a giant mirror that glows with recurring images.

The ornaments of power, the universal symbols, blend into hypnotic blurs of textural, throbbing colour: tacky 3-D postcard impressions of the Virgin Mary cut with dangling footage of faces caressed by hands: Third World tribal initiation ceremonies (which are acceptable), juxtapose with equally bloody-looking but innocuous Temple Ov Psychick Youth rituals (unacceptable). The atmosphere becomes stifling.

CRACK! Art school video techniques look so much more convincing when carried out with self-discipline and purpose.

The purpose is mass hallucination, the method enchantment, and enchantment is exactly what is taking place here on all levels. The hypnotic elements of strobe lights, the whirr of the Dream Machine, the primal mantra of Buddhist drum rhythms and rock guitars, the spell of meaningless oratory.

The many-headed beast of the crowd is plunged into a pulsating trance dance. An angel, or maybe a devil is invoked. Jim Jones cackles his last hyena laugh as his followers make their sound in the white night.

CRACK! A small, elfin figure bawls with tuneless violence into a microphone that’s threatening to choke him as he stands perilously straddled between two monitors, Der Putsch leather and tattoos glistening in the heat. Wild eyes popping from a shaven skull. The classic rockist image is cut, only to be derided by a large furry hat perched incongruously on the top of his head. A music journalist nearby, wondering what such millinery signifies, scribbles something meaningful.

A cute Berlin blonde spike-top rises purposefully head and shoulders above the pulsating silhouette of heads at the front of the stage. She reaches up and grabs the singer’s crotch. Fumbling, she tries to perform fellatio, but the singer instead jumps frog-like into the rippling crowd, still bawling.

Equipment gets damaged. People have sex. Er, this must be rock’n’roll! The journalist scowls and scribbles feverishly...

By two-thirty the last stragglers wind their way out through the debris and onto the street. Some ashen-faced, trembling, nauseated. Others angry, some bored, unimpressed, some ecstatic. Few are exactly sure what they’ve just seen. A large black Psychic Cross has been sprayed on the wall above them – the same symbol as they wear sewn onto their grey jackets and hand-painted Kaftans, or have tattooed across their (wasted) biceps. It hangs silently over the city in the sickly yellow buzz of the streetlights. Marking the spot like a gravestone, a piece of history and mystery. It may bury itself like a martial artist’s star in the subconscious levels of some neophytes’ minds, perchance to enter into their dreams that night.

The symbol looks aptly like a strange TV aerial. Its tripach cross design inviting interpretations involving Christ and the two thieves, or a timeline incorporating the past, present, and future. It’s similar to the alchemical glyph meaning ‘very poisonous’ and the Japanese symbolic cipher, (or kana), for ‘Fuck’. It’s also reminiscent of the Fascist/Christian emblem in Peter Watkins’ ‘60s cult pic Privilege that culminated in Paul Jones’ ultimate pop rally, and a dead ringer for the Samurai ideogram meaning ‘Master’. It can also be cleverly arranged from the letters P.T.V., and it is an outside broadcast of this particular company that we have just experienced.

If the main criterion for the creating of any cult is the stoking of fanaticism, then in this world of graphic corporate identity, of Capitalists making capital out of man’s innate symbolism (from the Christian Cross to the bird on a Barclaycard) – it’s only logical that such fanaticism must also be stoked with its own symbols.

The singer and co-director of the company, a geomancer named Genesis P-Orridge, has a stained glass Psychic Cross hanging in his East London apartment, the morning sun illuminating it as he talks.

A copy of the PTV video of Catalan flickers on the large colour television in the corner, director Derek Jarman playing pyromaniacally with the flames of Jordi Vallis’ car as it lies on the beach outside Salvador Dalí’s house – crashed on the spot where Un Chien Andalou was filmed. Gen’s daughter Caresse watches daddy on TV as she lies across the couch with Tanith the dog, baby Genesse gurgles happily on his lap, steam rises from the cups, as if in a Jacques Brel song.

As a father and now, approaching 40, homeowner, Genesis is exemplary. Many critics find this fact at odds with his stage persona, and want to know what his ‘real’ name is. Perhaps it is because people are used to pop stars, artists and their ilk creating a false public image that is at odds with their own character, as ‘Entertainment’.

His real name, though, is Genesis P-Orridge, (changed by deed poll in the early ‘70s