Strength Weekly

Back in the days when gentlemen’s style magazines were attempting a balance
between chesty starlets and feature articles of substance, rather than the current
formula designed solely to dance in your well-lagered lap, the pioneering and
much missed Editor of GQ, the late Michael VerMeulen, invited me to fly to Las
Vegas in order to nail the alien thing. Las Vegas is as close as you can fly to Area
51, also known as Dreamland, a swathe of land attached to the gigantic acreages
of Nellis Air Force Base in the Nevada desert.

VerMeulen was happy to pay fees and air fares for a feature that we both knew
would signally fail to deliver anything of substance if substance was to comprise the
uncovering of an unwholesome relationship between the American government and
extra-terrestrial creatures able to bend gravity to their passionless will. The Editor, a
man of strong views often delivered across crowded rooms in a stentorian manner,
regarded the whole alien thing as bullshit. He had, however, a taste for material
that attempted to understand what lay behind beliefs that were impetuously
adopted yet widely distributed. My brief was to cover a lot of ground, some of
which lay between Nellis and Roswell, New Mexico, much of which would focus
on tales and fragments that could be found flying at ever increasing speed
through the cloud chambers of the contemporary mythosphere.

My own fascination with impetuous belief derives in part from an eager and
immersive experience of the Sixties. To wind back that far is to make a shortish
story far too long - it will be sufficient to submit that I did everything you were
supposed to do in those years of letgo and associated with some hardened
practitioners of the art of Living in Vagueness. The mastery of the vague, which
loosened so many from the austere and straitened materialism of the Fifties, was
to become, in the ensuing decades, the invaluable philosophical instrument of those
for whom the confusion of the outer with the inner would constitute a strategy for
survival.

I must try to be precise about what I mean by vagueness. So totally uncool
did the material world become in the course of the 60s that systems of analysis
originating from it were summarily dismissed from usage. The act of evaluation
was similarly curtailed - it was okay to love or hate things but not, like, as an
ego. Things were good because they emanated their goodness - all you needed
to do was submit to these essences in order to appreciate them. This was not
the reluctant strategy of the Self under fire, it was a voluntary liquidation in the
interests of attunement to a universe of essence and vibration.

At the street level it meant that a lot of the people you knew consistently
stopped short of saying what they thought or felt in favour of a fulsome,
celebratory issuance of vapour. Psychology still existed but it was recomposed in
terms of value-free interiority - the further you travelled inside, the closer you
came to formless essence. The psyche was certainly not a place of intensification or
contradiction.

I went along with a fair amount of bollocks back then but the business of
valorising vagueness unsettled me. It seemed to involve little more than the
worship of Nothing and, as such, had advanced no further than the faiths and
beliefs of the straights and normals who had constructed the horrid world that
we wished to supplant.

The idea that certain monolithic and enduring spiritual institutions are based
on Nothing has never ceased to astound me. The idea that a subscription to Nothing
might get you through the night hardly seems fair. The decisiveness and efficiency
with which many people lead lives based on a vague belief that there is some overall
purpose to their activities leads me to conclude, sourly and enviously, that there
must be something in all this Nothing. Clearly it would be comforting to believe in
some of this bullshit but really, life’s too short.

Over the last thirty years I have been involved in a personal yoga of
disentanglement featuring the assumption of a variety of difficult and ineptly
balanced positions. For several years, once the Sixties wound down into 1973
or thereabouts, I was simply relieved not to have to affect a childlike openness to
experience in the same breath as a demonstration of worldweary, omniscient cool.
This was a double bind well worth consigning to oblivion. It was not until the late
Eighties that I began to realise that my encounters with the Vague, always a source
of irritation, were on the increase again and were, this time around, accompanied by
the feeling that Vague had gone mainstream. It is tempting but possibly romantic to
speculate that the psychic counterpoint to the craven, Thatcherite engorgement of
the wallet was an anxious yearning for emptiness.

The entangled dance between these extremes is nowhere more eloquently
performed than on the Strip in Las Vegas. Locked in a slow, humid conga,
thousands of tourists shuffle past the spectacular hotel and casino facades whose
incongruous pastiches induce a love of flying - far, far away from the roulette
wheel to places of adventure, grandeur and timeless wisdom. The Luxor Hotel is
strong on the latter commodity - a scale model of the Great Pyramid of Cheops
fronted by a painted Sphinx as long as a 707, it offers ensuite apartments terraced
all the way up to the pyramidal apex and, at no extra cost, the implied possibility of
communing with the cat and dog gods who inspired men to make mummies and
move masonry.

At this intersection of the ancient astral and the American attraction I took a
buffet lunch with a man who lived in a trailer town right next to Area 51. Glenn
Campbell was author of The Groom Lake Desert Rat, an electronic newsletter
from the front line of contemporary mass hallucination. His wry, sceptical field
reports had captivated me for months. Campbell, aka PsychoSpy, wrote regularly
about the exotic characters who either lived in or made pilgrimages through
Rachel, Nevada (pop 103). Despite the amused distance he kept from the subjects
of his reports, Campbell was patently enthralled by some of the detailed accounts
that he had extracted from those privileged to reverse engineer anti-gravity devices
alongside helpful aliens in heavily secured hangars.

When I visited Rachel myself, I met Sharon, the young woman employed by
Campbell as his assistant at the Area 51 Research Centre - an archive and sales
outlet housed in a weather-beaten trailer. As I poked around she let me in on a
truth about the whole alien thing. The grey tourists with toddlers’ bodies, it
transpired, were actually the fallen troops of Satan, abetted by members of the
New Age movement. They had been despatched to deceive us about the imminent
Rapture, wherein the righteous would ascend to Heaven for ‘a seven year party’
while those bearing the Mark of the Beast would stay behind, standing on their
heads in a sea of excrement. Or something like that. I may be conflating two
accounts here, one of them last heard some considerable time ago, in the shadows
at the back of the bike sheds.

To move from Glen Campbell’s futurism to his assistant’s medievalism in
the space of a car ride from Las Vegas to Rachel was to embrace the unfussy
inclusiveness of contemporary hysterical belief. The historical sequencing of
folklore seems to have collapsed, leaving a pick’n'mix that subverts the notion
that the things people believe in are invariably determined by certain specifics
of their time. At the end of the 19th century flying objects were often identified
as extraterrestrial blimps or gas balloons. Our 20th century sightings of flying
saucers are informed by our passage into the age of jets and rockets. This sort
of analysis is useful but as a model it does not stretch to an explanation of our
concurrent sightings of angels, spirits, fairies and Satanic ritual abusers.

As Elaine Showalter points out in ‘Hystories’, her account of contemporary
hysterical epidemics, the clinically efficient late 19th century diagnosis of
hysteria, then restricted almost entirely to women, has little value a century
later, when modern media have the capacity to disseminate anxiety about a
wide range of topics on a global scale. The pervasiveness of this ‘anxietised
news’ contributes to the formation of a new style of hysteria characterised
by what could be called a broad-minded credulity afflicting men and women
alike and drawing on centuries of superstition as well as a predictable menu
of fashionable hot topics.

To drive, as I did, from Nevada to New Mexico and back again was to snorkel
through some fairly turbid undercurrents. In a motel in Arizona I took a room
next to the one used by the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, when he
was planning his destruction of the Federal Building, a deed that would result in
the deaths of 168 people. The motel manager assured me that McVeigh was ‘A
very nice young man, very nice. Very polite.’ After his arrest, McVeigh claimed
that he was compelled to do what he did because the US Army had implanted a
mind control microchip in his buttock.

Somehow the idea that McVeigh was very nice seemed to be a precondition for
such an invasive procedure. If he had been a very nasty young man then the
attentions of a malign implanter would have been superfluous. Obviously, a very
nice young man would not dream of doing what he did unless he had been
tampered with. This predilection for the remote control of innocent citizens is
something the US Army shares with extra-terrestrials, whose favourite orifice for
such lodgements, according to the literature, is the nose. All this is to place the cart
before the horse, however, for we are first obliged to ask who or what it was
that implanted the extraterrestrials in the minds of very nice people. And while
we’re about it, we should wonder about the implantation of fairies and angels,
spirits and demons, the madness of cows and the vague feeling that there is a
pattern behind, like, everything.

In her essay ‘On Circles’, presented elsewhere in this programme, Carole Silver
persuasively demonstrates the persistence of certain structures beneath some of
the implantations. She compares the activities around fairy rings to 20th century
alien abduction scenarios then describes the manner in which hundreds of years of
folklore can come full circle, as it were, when crop rings and alien visitations are
fused into a single narrative. Originality is under attack here - despite the obligation
to update the trappings of these tales with references to contemporary technology,
it seems we can only dream or imagine according to templates that are as old as
the hills.

These supernatural events are not, of course, seen as imaginary. Things are being
done to us. In this sense there is a continuum running from a delight in faerie to a
conviction that central government is out to get us and will use all the covert devices
necessary to bend us to its will, to disarm us, if you like. Politics, presumably, begins
at the point when the things that are being done to us are attributed to agencies in
the real world. The Oklahoma City bombing, as a response to things being done to a
very nice young man, is, in these terms, pre-political. This notion, however, begs so
many questions that I’ll just move along now.

If we could resist suggestion none of this would be going on. Suggestibility is the
key and suggestibility is the ultimate concern of ‘I Am Dandy’. Before a suggestion
can take hold, attention must be monopolised. Everyone knows how to do this. It’s
what you do when you want people to pay attention to you. No conversation would
work without it. Our minds would wander, registering an attention deficit.

Attention seekers may monopolise against our will, when we will feel brainwashed,
bullied or hectored. They may install a monopoly without our knowing, in which
case we might, if we found out, claim to have been subliminally influenced. There
is a special case, though, in which we actually consent to the reduction of our
resistance to the monopoly. This might be called hypnosis.

The example of the pioneering and innovative hypnotist Milton H. Erickson forces a
reassessment of hypnotism in general. Rather than commandeering attention,
Erickson appears to slip in through the back door and, before his subject knows it,
behave as if he were the lodger. Erickson talks constantly to the subject, in a
low-key manner, eschewing explicit instructions in favour of rambling, chatty
small talk. Present in these ramblings are unobtrusive suggestions, often disguised
as convivial invitations to sit back and take it easy. Single words associated with
pleasure and relaxation are worked quite repetitively into sentences - again, not
as instructions but colloquial embellishments. Using what at least sounds like rather
monotonous and unremarkable conversation, Erickson delivers his subjects into
deep trance.

If Erickson can do it, why can’t we? Sounds easy enough. Notwithstanding the
tremendous craft and subtlety deployed by Erickson, it may be that, as keen
amateurs, we all have some of his skill and much of the suggestibility of his
subjects. It may be that we are endowed with the capacity to facilitate trance
in others and ourselves. The same sort of thing has been said of telepathy,
of course, and the evidence for such a latency is practically nonexistent. But
if trance is seen as emerging from the close control of attention, wherein the
subject becomes indifferent to all but a narrow range of input then our everyday
lives suddenly seem rather entrancing.

To be entranced readily is to be available, it may be a precondition of hysteria.
All the wild scares, all the mad enthusiasms - and their equally energetic
disavowals - put down their roots in such easy capture. ‘I Am Dandy’ seeks to
examine a continuum that runs from everyday persuasion and cajolement to
unconcealed hypnosis. It suggests that the seeds of mass hysteria and moral
panics are to be found in the most commonplace transactions. Featuring scenes
in which members of a group use a range of overt and covert hypnotic techniques
to enforce their will, the show alludes not only to ordinary bullying but to some of
the rather more controversial phenomena that constitute the hysterical landscape.
The broad-minded credulity of its characters facilitates their immersion in the
warps of recovered memory and the transports of abduction, possession and
delusion. The idea that in trance there is truth offers them something that is
simultaneously fragile, focused and nourishingly vague.