A POSTMODERN ODYSSEY – THE MISADVENTURES OF A POLYTROPIC MAN
Polytropic is an extremely useful word to define individuals possessing the opposite mental state to those suffering from the increasingly common obsessional neurological problem we define as autism.
I appear to have lived an unusually inexplicable life. As an example, whilst writing this history, I found out that Coleman Street in the City of London, the modest location of the paper merchant’s office where I was employed in the mid 1950s, was in 1640, the frenzied tipping point of the first of the bourgeois industrial revolutions that eventually toppled the traditional agricultural civilisations. This was where, having been triggered by the new social media of print, young apprentices became inflamed and the Puritan Parliamentarians were driven to pass the point of no return. At the same time as I was employed there as a representative, my wife and I were living in a very modest flat in quiet Powis Square in Notting Hill Gate. A few years later Powis Square became the epicentre of the radical English Counterculture of the 1960s. At the time I was already being deeply affected by the strange novels of the writer-magician John Cowper Powys. Does the concatenation of these events mean anything at all?
I am permanently puzzled by finding myself in situations where chance is not just dropping hints but forcing me into unpredictable actions in scenarios that are stranger in some ways than the well known narratives of Wells, Tolkien, and C.S.Lewis, and (branded onto my brain in my childhood long ago) the lesser known BBC radio serials,‘The Box of Delights’ by John Masefield and ‘The Human Age’ by Wyndham Lewis. Many other people I know seem to be cut off from what Einstein would doubtless consider vibrations of a higher level of reality than those that manifest themselves as the illusory material world of space-time. Am I a transmitter or receiver or both? What could I learn from deep thinking, non-materialistic, and non-deterministic scientists like Einstein and Jung?
To put this to what I hoped would be a final test I planned a practical joke at the expense of the widespread cult of human spiritual, reputational or even physical immortality in the form of an imaginary experiment. With Lewis CarrolI’s ‘Hunting of the Snark’ as a kind of guide, I planned this to take place 1974. This would be a pure ‘acte gratuit’ centred on ego destruction through ascending whilst disappearing. This experimental attempt to transcend the most complex level of the cosmos, human culture, whilst involving and evolving at the same time, is I believe unprecedented but not in principle irrational, especially if Einstein’s hypothesis concerning vibrational energy and matter is followed. On the unlikely event that the experiment succeeded and I vanished heavenwards, I had prepared a Last Will and Testament for my puzzled colleagues insisting that all evidence of my ever having existed must be destroyed to avoid having my imaginative genius later exploited by ambitious religious confidence tricksters. The mere planning may have ‘cleansed the doors of perception’ and worked better on me than I realised at the time.
An Accidental Sociologist or a Wizard in a Pinball Machine
Unlike the ‘pinball wizard’, hero of the Who’s musical, “Tommy”, I feel more like the pinball itself bouncing around in the universe. I have no idea who started the game by operating the spring-loaded plunger and then manipulating the flippers, but I have been suddenly propelled all over the place, back and forth, from side to side, up ramps and down dark holes. I can better communicate my career to other scientific thinkers by describing myself as an ‘accidental’ academic sociologist and psychologist. The ‘accidental’ theme was provoked by the example of Peter Berger, a well-known sociologist of religion who co-wrote “The Social Construction of Reality”. He also wrote “An Accidental Sociologist”, explaining that he studied sociology because the times of the courses in New York he was really interested in clashed with his essential paid-work schedule. In retrospect it appears to me that psychology often attracts students with personal psychological problems and sociology often attracts anti-social misfits with primary social relationship problems.
In 1961 I committed myself to spend three years in England whist my wife was ordered to recover from tuberculosis. This followed from what turned out to be an ‘accidental’ medical mistake in reading an X ray taken in London where, travelling by car, we were on holiday from our home in Iran. It was months before the doctors, who had insisted we stayed in England, agreed to my urgent request for a recheck and discovered their mistake. By then it was too late to return to our home in Tehran. Luckily for me, an experimental double honours degree course in Psychological and Sociological Theory had just opened at Leeds University. I would rather have studied archaeology ancient history or cultural anthropology, but following my late application, it was the only course not requiring GCE Latin that was open to me. I got the good news that I had been accepted when passing through Istanbul as I returned from driving to Tehran to collect the contents of the home we had made there. As backpackers slowly making our way East we had settled there when we found employment as teachers. Fortunately my lecturers at Leeds University were a heterogeneous team including Weberian and Parsonian sociologists of religion and values. The only other school of sociology in England at the time, the London school of Economics, founded to aid the administration of the Empire, was then heading in the reverse direction, specialising more in aiding anti-British revolutionary politics and economics.
Early in my switchback career, as a nineteen year old national-service Pilot Officer Navigator in the RAF, and to the horror of the Wing Commander in charge, I had been accidentally appointed by the Air Ministry as Flying Wing Adjutant of two squadrons of fighter jets at Duxford Airfield just outside Cambridge. I was now surrounded by an aristocratic academic world which, like Jude the Obscure, l dreamed I might one day be privileged to enter. Ten years later, at Leeds Student Union, free from infantile control by unimaginative school teachers and academics, I threw myself into student activities. I had been shocked by the lack of support for cultural events compared with the sporting and social clubs. Supported by other student cultural leaders I was elected Cultural Affairs Officer of the Student Union, the first in a British university. I realised that my studies would be affected but I was not on the normal careers ladder, and anyway at that time post-graduate scholarships were simply not offered to graduates over thirty and I was thirty-one.
Another bolt from the blue struck me in the first week of the finals, when, in those days, all marks were awarded. My father had a heart attack out of the blue which was accidentally mis-diagnosed and then suddenly died. I had to drive down to London to comfort my stricken mother and return immediately. Another surprising turn of the wheel of fortune was that whatever I had studied or however good my marks were, they turned out to have had no influence whatsoever on my future academic career. After graduation I replied to an advertisement seeking a Community Arts Officer for the University of Western Australia and was interviewed by the head of their Adult Education Department. He told me I was the only person in the Commonwealth he could find with the necessary managerial experience in a university environment. Even though I had just graduated, I would brought to Perth as a tenured lecturer to head their unusual state-wide Community Arts Programme. I will never forget my mother’s self sacrifice in urging me to leave England to seize this remarkable opportunity to follow my calling. She came to stay with us in Australia regularly and finally settled in NZ to join in the fun after I moved there. I had spent two years in Perth building up independent cultural infrastructures especially in the neglected field of cinema, when the head of the Adult Education Department retired and his deputy took over. He had little real interest in the arts but loved power and began restructuring the department to provide courses and conferences for business organisations. On appealing to the Vice Chancellor all he could offer was to pay my expenses if I wished to return to the UK. It was time to leave a job I had really loved.
I spotted an advert for a qualified sociologist needed to assist a political science professor in Sydney to set up the first school of theoretical sociology in Australia at the University of NSW. He himself had very little training in sociology and could find no one else available and qualified at that time, but he promised me in writing that if I gave up my tenured lectureship he would be able to restore it within a few months when his next budget was approved. In the interim I would need to be appointed as a humble untenured Teaching Fellow and start a PhD, but could take my time over it. My sister, an activist Marxist sociology academic at the LSE who knew him, assured me that I could trust him to honour his promise. Setting up special subjects and initiating and teaching the main course in Sociology 101 would be my priority. I burned my boats and came to Sydney early in 1971 and had to hit the ground running. My lectures to a large number of students proved a great success as my first report recorded. I started on my hastily-chosen PhD in the Sociology of Art and Value Orientations which would attempt an account of the changes of the social role of art and its sponsorship.
Then another completely unexpected event took place. Early in 1968, inspired by Mao Tse Dung’s so-called Cultural Revolution and the misleadingly called Free Speech movement at Stanford University, Student Power erupted in the universities in Sydney and Melbourne. Taking as their role models not only the tactics but the names of the student rioters in universities in California, and Paris in particular, student leaders and junior academics in Western Europe and Australia formed small but activist and strictly organised cadres. In Australia and America they relied on the groundswell created by the government’s unpopular use of conscription when they joined the Americans in the civil war in Vietnam. These small activist groups began highly aggressive direct action to test out the tolerance of the university administrations. I was concerned that the universities as communities of scholars which were already being polluted by accepting direct funding from military, commercial, and industrial powers, would become politicised by fanatics like the Maoist and neo-Marxist student revolutionaries.
In early 1968, before the influential Paris riots, I founded an activist group of students and junior academics with no formal bureaucratic structure at all. I called on my knowledge of social science and psychology to maximise personal responsibility and leadership through charismatic example. We called ourselves ALF, Action for Love And Freedom. This was a synthesis of achieving freedom from mindless and inhumane bureaucratic control (exemplified by the Czech government’s resilient response to the recent Soviet Russian invasion) and learning from the Hippies example that demonstrating not anger and hate, but love and artistic expression, could mollify the hatred of shocked conventional public authorities. Although I was notorious for my abandoned style of dancing, I could not lose myself in the repetitive rhythm of Rock and Roll as my brain had already been permanently restructured by the romantic music of the great masters of the orchestra, Berlioz and Mahler and the chamber music of Schubert. I personally set an example by refusing to take consciousness-raising drugs or endorsing sexual promiscuity which had been the downfall of the antinomian medieval millenarian movements I was lecturing about in my special classes. Instead I limited my defiance of convention to the bizarre costumes I began wearing and making ecstatic and entertaining raves or speeches on campus and in the Domain in Sydney which allowed free speech. I began calling this existential behaviour where being was its own reward, “The Fun Revolution”.
The initial reaction of the University authorities was puzzlement, but they soon realised that unlike the other student power groups we only wanted bureaucratic reform, not violent left wing revolution. My study of religious revitalisation movements came in handy. With the cooperation of the Student Union, the Alfs and I organised Mass Meetings in the Roundhouse to ‘moralise’ the masses. I did the unthinkable. Instead of a Chairman I set up an empty chair for the spirit of Alf and I took on the role of Master of Ceremonies. The meetings, like counter culture ‘happenings’, were an example of existential reclaiming of the present. We had no agenda and would ceremoniously throw any motions passed into a trash bin where they would end up anyway. Aided by a drum troll from a small rock band, individuals (who included the Vice Chancellor) just stood up and expressed their emotions. I also canvassed members of the community of scholars and put together a Reform Charter encouraging participation by students and staff in administrative decision making which was later endorsed at a mass meeting. Reforms soon began to take place as staff and students realised they had strong common interests against those clearly using the university for their personal political advancement or their own non-academic business agenda.
I have been going into some detail since what happened during the next few months was a critical event in my own history if not one of the defining moments of that remarkable year of 1968. I had inadvertently kicked over a hornets’ nest. Out of the blue I received a letter from my Professor informing me that, since I had made “insufficient progress” in my studies for my doctoral thesis, my fellowship was hereby terminated. I would be dismissed just before Christmas. I wrote back immediately seeking an interview to find out why he had not even mentioned to me before that I was making insufficient progress. I also informed him that I was reconsidering my topic to bring it more into line with conclusions about the power of art and symbols used playfully to ameliorate rigid confrontations between authoritarian bureaucratic organisations with different ideologies. We could have met and sorted out the problem, especially since, in order to persuade me to leave my tenured position in faraway Perth to help him establish his new department, he had assured me in writing that I could spend as much time as I liked on my thesis.
He did not reply to my letter, even though in a few weeks time he would be leaving for England on a sabbatical. I immediately met with the Dean of the Arts Faculty who said that the Higher Degree Committee had no authority to compel my professor to change his mind, to meet me, or even to answer my letters. The Staff Association, to whom I showed my initial correspondence with my professor, did promise to back me up if I took the University to court for their breach of contract but that would mean unpleasant litigation which I had earlier avoided at the University of WA as I believe it might have affected my spiritual well being. I was also informed by post from Sydney University at the same time that my lectures at their Free University as an unpaid tutor on the provocative theories of Marshall McLuhan on what referred to as post-literate society (a topic I alone was lecturing on in Australia) were no longer required. A strange coincidence.
Evacuated three times during the war, and having spent some time as a semi-nomad, I have acquired resilience in the face of sudden changes. I am not your usual hothouse-raised intellectual or academic. By Christmas I was out of a job and living in a crowded student commune. My wife, a teacher, had thrown me out of our Paddington terrace house. My university reform activities and hippie like behaviour were understandably too much for her and she may well have joined forces with my professor to pressurise me to leave the academic world to resume our nomadic lifestyle. Our marriage in 1956 had been companionate and childless and entered into consciously to facilitate our joint love of travelling in exotic countries. Using ritual to minimise the inevitable psychological damage, we held a farewell party for our joint friends, and I left carrying my bags and bidding everyone a formal goodbye.
My dream of learning, teaching and debate in cultured congenial surroundings proved to be an unreal, outdated fantasy. The nihilistic, irrational and evil neo-Marxist totalitarian ‘woke’ world was just dawning in political science and sociology schools in the Western world and I was kept fully occupied busy using fun revolutionary techniques to provoke laughter to undo all the hate needed for such self-loathing nihilism to succeed. I was an early if rather spectacular example of rationally inexplicable ‘cancellation’. I had been foolishly naive and trusting.
At this point another sensational change in my fortunes took place. I went see the about-to-retire Vice Chancellor and the Deputy VC, who was to be his successor, to make my case for an unusual, informal but legitimate role that would allow me to stay and study on the campus at UNSW. I had been using ‘useful fictions’ (like rules in games, money, and roles in narratives) to prevent the community morale that I had raised so high being crushed by puritanical personalities who were compulsively driven to make everyone as miserable and full of existential despair as they were. I proposed that I be appointed to what is now sometimes called a ‘liminal’ position on the campus. The epic ‘Lord of the Rings’ by Tolkien, a remarkable master of myth and language was enjoying a spectacular revival at that time so I suggested that I be appointed to the role of official Wizard of the University of NSW. In the narrative, Gandalf, to whom I was frequently likened as ‘Grand Alf’, trusts uneducated peasants more than those devious intellectuals who can rationalise anything to suit their desperate desire for power. He is their intellectual guide and their example of courage. Wizards advise rulers without being ordered what to do by them. In times of crisis they may even briefly take over. They had seen the success of what I could do using unprecedented role-acting social techniques like psycho-drama and the sensually arousing music of the new counter-culture. A interesting article ‘University That Swings’ appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. During 1968, to raise money for the World University Service, I had travelled extensively to campuses throughout Australia with my existential Fun Revolutionary Mission. My proposed idea was not laughed out of court but carefully considered. We all agreed that the Student Union would need to put skin in the game by becoming a partner in the appointment and sharing in paying a modest honorarium. Following my psycho-drama presentation in front of the suspicious Student Union leaders, “Have your worst suspicions confirmed”, on April 1st 1969 the University and Student administrations jointly announced that I had been appointed Official Wizard of UNSW.
With no money or intellectual reputation left, and as a wizard, regarded at the bottom of both moral and intellectual hierarchies. I already reached the spiritual nadir that leads to the awakening of unique spiritual shamanic abilities described by cultural anthropologists.
Some of what happened next at UNSW and later at Melbourne University and in Cathedral Square in Christchurch, is described in my recent book “The Fun Revolution; Jack’s Adventures in Ideologyland” and in my earlier memoir “My Life as a Miracle”, published by Canterbury University Press in 1998. This experimental academic appointment was in my personal opinion a very significant event in the history of Western Civilisation comparable to the appearance of those monks who, whilst remaining under the authority of the Church, began the intellectual movement towards the less dogmatic scientific method and materialistic experimentation. I was moving carefully and politely towards existential, open-ended, and non-reductionist, psychological and socio-cultural experimentation. My last appearance at UNSW as their resident wizard, before setting out on a lengthy tour of Australian Universities for the World University Service, was to present a serio-comic mortality/immortality play on stage, reflecting the traditional dissertations given by applicants for doctorates before their superiors. The topic crudely summarised the historial interaction of man and woman in search of the lost spiritual androgyne. This was inspired by the recent impact of the recently published remarkable psycho-analytical book, “Life Against Death” by Norman O Brown. This story of gradual degradation led to my entering a new reality like Alice passing through the looking glass as a portal.
Trying to Restore an Overall Theory of Reality
In 1971, on behalf of the Union Council of Melbourne University who had appointed me their wizard on the basis of my activities at the University of NSW, I established the first non-accredited university department of experimental cosmology with inter-disciplinary lectures and workshops which were open to the fee-paying public. These took place in a beautiful but temporarily empty neo-Gothic building in the centre of the campus which I was authorised to use by the Vice Chancellor. I made it clear that a non-materialist I was using the word Cosmology as a concept meaning much more than reductionist astrophysics, especially since Ilya Prigogine’s theory of Dissipative Structures had just transformed the old deterministic and homeostatic thermodynamics of Newton which had made nonsense of overall cosmological evolution. I also chose a relativistic and mathematically valid geo-peripheral/ourano-centric model of the physical aspects of the material universe as the frame for my evolutionary process cosmology. This would guarantee that unimaginative dogmatic materialists would avoid the lectures which would certainly enrage them. It would also enable me to link up with the cosmological synthesis of Truth, Beauty and Goodness of the persecuted alchemists like Kepler, that the treacherous and ambitious Galileo and his mechanistic followers had destroyed.
Whilst official Wizard of the University of NSW I had already begun work on creating a synthesis of both traditional and recent neural, psychological, social, cultural and personality theories which made sense of the pre-literate and medieval revitalisation movements that I was previously lecturing about. This was a priority for me as the late 1960s counter culture was showing many of the characteristics of what was being called by some, a ‘post-literate’ revitalisation movement. Meanwhile, without my hearing of it until the 1990s, Victor Turner, an ex-Marxist anthropologist on the other side of the world, had discovered process theory and was actually using non-politicised living theatre to experiment with role theory, psychological theories of behaviour and recent neurological findings. His adoption of ideas concerning liminality (where rigid borders sometimes dissolve into thresholds) led him to hypothesise the emergence in times of cognitive dissonance into what he called ‘social anti-structures’ which could be a transition to ‘communitas’. This is traditionally a topic of major interest for sociologists and anthropologists; especially the great founders like Durkheim and his pioneering study of different forms of solidarity and Max Weber’s concern with subjective motivation which threw doubt on the Enlightenment’s foundational belief in dogmatic economic determinism and materialistic experimentation. Starting an academic career after such a frequently disrupted and varied personal life gave me a different take from other theorists more stably embedded in their culture.
By 1974 the gentlemanly Union Warden had departed and had been replaced by a Chairman, a raving young neo-Marxist, and my last protector, the Union Council Activities Officer, was about to leave to have a baby. Similarly accused of corrupting the youth, Socrates chose to take Hemlock rather than go into exile. I chose exile in New Zealand where free speech and good humour were not quite extinguished.
Stranger in a Strange Land
In Christchurch I had to adopt stand-up comedian techniques, not only to avoid being ‘disappeared’ as a non person, but also to protect free speech in the public square. In the early 1980s, with the help of New Zealand art gallery directors, coordinated by Rodney Wilson, a highly unusual administrator, I was acquisitioned as the world’s first “Living Work of Art”. My aim was to prove to the world that Oscar Wilde’s paradoxical assertion that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life”, made in his 1899 essay “The Decay of Lying”, was true. This became my solution to my problems of being too rational to be tolerated in an increasingly puritanical academic environment and too popular to be tolerated in an increasingly bureaucratised woke avant-garde aesthetic environment.
My next essay, “A Tale of Two Wizards”, tells a story where fact and fiction are inextricably entwined. Combining subjective idealism and objective realism through imaginative art and uplifting existential magic enabled me to escape the destruction of my delicate sensibility and my non-possessive love.
