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They would have no more reason for thinking that they were part of 'Harry Potter's story' than the story of anyone else that they met.
Indeed, the idea that this was 'Harry's story' would seem ludicrous because, as far as they are concerned, they are in the middle of their own story.
Ebbinghaus curve of forgetting. What happens is that witnesses slowly absorb events into their own narrative, losing the loose ends and unexplained incidents and making sense of what they can with respect to their own lives and prejudices.
The role of the ego, it appears, is less like a President or a Prime Minister deciding on a course of action, and more like their spin doctor, explaining the action afterwards in the best possible light.
We are attempting to find the spirit of those events, and we can only do that by invoking them ourselves.
Drummond may have been old, but he had plans. He had previously achieved a touch of local fame with a band called Big in Japan. The band had included Holly Johnson, Pete Burns and Ian Broudie, all of whom would go on, like Drummond, to have more than their fair share of number one records.
Modern punk bands recreate the raw guitar music and confrontational fashion that were created before the original punk spirit faded, but this is to recreate the result of punk rather than punk itself -
The singles were "shit", at least in Drummond's opinion, but he loved the bands that made them. Or more accurately, he loved the idea of those bands.
Principia Discordia, or How I Found The Goddess and What I Did To Her When I Found Her,
Thornley showed Hill some poetry he was writing. It included a reference to order eventually arising out of chaos. Hill laughed at this. He told Thornley that the idea of 'order' was an illusion. Order is just something that the human mind projects onto reality. What really exists behind this fake veneer is an infinite, churning chaos. For Hill, an atheist, the failure to understand this was the major folly of the organised religions of the world, all of which claim that there is an organising principle at work in the Universe.
Campbell had shown Drummond that the impossible was only impossible if you did not stand up and do it. It did not matter how big the practical problems were, or how crazy the enterprise may seem. This was an important lesson in Drummond's education. He took that attitude, got a bass guitar, and went off to make music.
In October 1966, Jim Garrison sat down to read the Warren Commission Report and tried to make sense of the assassination of the President.
The Commission's conclusions did not, to his mind, tell the story of what really happened. If anything, it told the story of what people wanted to have happened. It had chosen the most palatable narrative, rather than the true one.
In time he started to question his own memory, and began seriously entertaining the idea that he was a victim of false memories or mind control. These ideas would eventually lead to the confused and frightening world of paranoid schizophrenia, a fate that would prove to be not unusual for those who immersed themselves in Discordianism.
In fact, when the full enormity of actual events in this world is considered, such unlikely strings of events are guaranteed to happen.
the law of truly large numbers.
Thornley would have dismissed the mathematician's claims of coincidence, and instead viewed these events as what Carl Jung called 'synchronicity.'
Jung defined synchronicity as a "meaningful coincidence" or an "acausal connecting principle", where "acausal" means a string of events that cannot be fully explained by simple cause and effect. Or, to put it another way, if something is behind these events, then we don't know what.
many who dismiss his ideas about synchronicity as little
Once this is understood, the need to fight to protect the 'truth' of the model falls away and we are free to use different and contradictory models as circumstances change.
This is, as no doubt you have noticed, the second time in our story that a giant invisible rabbit spirit has appeared. This is of course a coincidence. It also has all the hall marks of what Jung would call synchronicity. Giant invisible rabbit spirits are extremely rare, so when two come along at once it is hard not to sit up and take notice.
The only example that springs readily to mind is Donnie Darko, a movie made in 2001 by Richard Kelly. What then – if anything – should we make of the fact that the film opens to a montage set to The Killing Moon by Echo & the Bunnymen?
What should we make of this? We shouldn't make anything of it. We should forget it and move on.
"where do you get your ideas from?"
Like everyone else, Moore would fudge an answer as best he could. But unlike most writers he recognised that it was actually a very good question and one that he would very much like an answer to.
"The one place that gods unarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity."
This is something that the Buddhists worked out early on. They used to ask students "What makes the grass green?", and expected them to discover through meditation that the answer was themselves.
But even if we accept that we only know the physical world through a mental approximation, we rarely acknowledge how much of the physical world is actually the product of the mental.
The world we actually live in is made of ideas that have left human minds and entered the physical world. Indeed, the story of our evolution is essentially the story of us retreating from the natural world into the mental one.
The reason we have a hard time understanding this, Moore realised, is because we lack a model of what the mental world is. The 'I' of awareness is our blind spot, to the extent that the consciousnesses of some of our cleverest and best educated minds, such as Dennett, will deny that consciousness even exists.
Moore set out to build a model of the mental world, a place sometimes referred to as the noosphere but which Moore calls Ideaspace.
So far, so uncontroversial. But where this becomes interesting is when we consider our own relationship to that world. Moore thought that we each had our own little corner of Ideaspace, our own home in the mental land. Something personal like Drummond's idea of Echo would live in Drummond's own section of Ideaspace. Many ideas, however, are shared, and while we may have our own personal version of them, they are more usefully said to exist in communal space. Concepts such as ‘Madonna’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’ or ‘Hitler’, for example, are shared by almost everybody. For Moore, these communal ideas
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similar to Jung's collected unconscious.
Indeed, he thought that artists had to, for it was their job to wander furthest from their own patch of the imagination and return with truly rare and exotic ideas which they had to use and make something out of. In this way the world we live in becomes increasingly changed by the mental world.
It is this process – the way thoughts exist and alter the world – that Moore uses the word 'magic' to describe.
"A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.”
Could sufficiently complex ideas evolve into a form of life, and wander Ideaspace as they saw fit?
It challenged him to come up with a theory or explanation as to how a major event in world history could have been represented in his mind before it had actually happened. This trail of thought would lead, decades later, to his theories on the 'acausal connecting principal' of synchronicity.
Moore calls Ideaspace and Jung called the collective unconscious.
If the physical manifestation of this eruption was anything to go by, it seemed to be linked to one of the most powerful magical ideas we have: money.
you're waiting for a reply."
while Moore's ideas about the nature of magic may not help us to understand Cauty and Drummond's personal motivations, they are a valid way to view actions that were the product of magical thinking.
But work on the book did not go well. Two things distracted him. One was listening to Schooly D.
But taken together, the ideas of sampling, hip-hop and Discordianism made a strange sort of sense.
The thinking behind Situationist détournements goes like this: every day we are bombarded by adverts, images, songs or videos. They are part of the spectacle of the system, distractions that keep us numb and alienated. Importantly, we get these whether we want them or not, for it is almost impossible to live in the modern world and not be subject to this bombardment. They are a form of psychic pollution, one which is forced on us by capitalists. As we cannot escape from this onslaught, the Situationists argued, our only honourable response is to fuck with
So when the JAMs started their first record with 15 seconds of All You Need Is Love,
This is a song about AIDS, a disease which had only become known to the general public a few years earlier and which brought an end to the sexual liberation of the 1960s and 70s.
Dave Brubeck Quartet's Take Five, which the JAMs retitled Don't Take Five (Take What You Want).
The finished record was shit, of course.
1987: What The Fuck Is Going On?,
