First of all, I’d like to pay tribute to Adam Parfrey and Feral House, the "publishers of the forbidden." We sell several Feral House titles such as Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook, Lords of Chaos: The Bloody Rise of the Satanic Metal Underground and Ian Brady’s The Gates of Janus. The House of Parfrey seems to appreciate, as I do, the vitality of the mongrel mix of high and low culture, and the energy found at the margins, away from the vitiated mainstream of America, in such topics as Conspiracy Theory, Crime, Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll. Feral House publications, along with Parfrey’s latest venture, Process, also digs those legendary periods of freedom, hedonism and cosmic ambition like the sixties and Weimar Germany.
The seminal Feral House title is Apocalypse Culture, a collection of essays that attempt to find the few remaining things that can shock our numb, satiated society. One of its more memorable authors is the late James Shelby Downard, a conspiracy theorist of the most hysterical type, who was paradoxically able to muster an extremely lucid stream of facts. I’ve just read his "autobiography" The Carnivals of Life and Death: My Profane Youth, 1913-1935 and I have to say I enjoyed it very much.
Basically Downard’s narrative is a obsessively repeated trope with variations – from a very early age he encounters groups of people who, aided actively and/or passively by his parents, are determined to kill him in strange, dramatic, ritualistic and almost slapstick ways. His enemies are the Ku Klux Klan and the Freemasons, here not simply racist or fraternal organizations, but devious occult conspiracies bent on sacrificing him as a scapegoat for their sins. Fortunately, plucky James, even at a tender age, is able to wield a shotgun or even toss a lighted match and dispatch his frequently inept tormentors. There are recurring elements in the string of dream-like incidents, such as weird prophetic books with his name on them, sympathetic wild beasts, and doors and steps booby trapped with retractable spikes. Famous people like President Franklin D. Roosevelt also frequently appear as Downard finds himself in the middle of historic events. One of my favorite scenes is when Downard witnesses the Ku Klux Klan Great Wizard "Colonel" William Joseph Simmons fellate Alexander Graham Bell in the window of the Jekyll Island Hunt Club Hotel as both hold million dollar gold certificates.
Despite the repetitions, inconsistencies and lack of credibility of the tale, the book makes for absorbing reading. It actually reminded me of Jerzy Kosinski works like Cockpit, in which there’s no continuous story-line, conclusion or final explanation but a series of violent, highly charged incidents. My mind was drawn in, trying to impose meaning, but the pieces seemed to configure in an infinite number of ways, never settling into a fixed solution. I tried occasionally to see things objectively, to figure out what really happened from the point of view of the no doubt baffled librarians and policemen Downard baited, but in the end his vision was too strong and I could only learn again the great lesson of the 20th century (whose greatest theory was relativity after all) – the illusory nature of "objective reality."
Since making connections is one of the duties of an artist, the paranoid view is, in fact, one of the prime artistic strategies of our time, another expression of the imaginative impulse, a tweaking and saturation of our world, a bestowal of life or death meaning and order on a mundane world, an insistence of the centrality of the observer and thinker. Salvador Dali called his method the "paranoiac-critical," and said "the only difference between a madman and me is that I am not mad," meaning that he was able to see the world with the hysterical craftiness of a crazy person, yet also able to assess, edit and reconfigure his own vision critically as an educated craftsman. Downard, due to his erudition and intelligence is able to do the same, and shape what could be insane ramblings into an affecting experience.
Like all good works of art The Carnival of Life and Death made me see the world in a different way, and I started to wonder about and research the oddly named "Sargon Society," the secret society of my High School, which included only the most well established sions of the Pittsburgh elite, and whose activities were carefully hidden. I may just write about it here at a later date – if THEY don’t get me first.
YR PAL,
UBU
