SEVEN

Concerning rabbits, we can and should take the yin with the yang.  Alice follows the white rabbit into Wonderland; Donnie follows Frank, the dark rabbit, "into the future" [1] Rabbits symbolise travel, transitions, crossing over a threshold; life into to death, darkness to light. Robert Anton Wilson intermittently and semi-sincerely claimed to have communicated with Pookah, a 6-foot tall white rabbit with celtic connections, who also accompanied Jimmy jolly Stewart invisibly through  'Harvey'.  Frank is also six feet tall.  In Watership Down, the Black Rabbit of Inlé guides the sun-worshipping bunnies into the great beyond, "following the river of death downstream" in the words of the song of the film of the book.  The video for I Will Follow You Into the Dark by Death Cab for Cutie tells the tale of two rabbits torn apart by time and fate.  'Death Cab for Cutie' is the song performed by The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band in the Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour film. This is followed by the closing Beatles number, 'Your Mother Should Know', the only obviously rehearsed scene in the film, in which a claimed 'Paul is Dead' clue appears in the form of black rose in McCartney's white lapel.  The closing credits roll, displaying the supporting cast in reverse order of appearance (more or less).  "Let's all get up and dance to song that was a hit before your mother was born", sings Paul.  We're moving through time.

John Lennon's Lewis Carrol fixation, which appears to have reached its zenith circa 1967, ties the white rabbit motif thematically to death in Beatles esoterica.  Sgt Pepper's centrepiece drum skin, seen 'as above, so below', through the looking glass, to be pointing straight to 'Faul' has a resemblance to Carroll's personal ephgrave [2] that has escaped hardly anyone.  The colour and complexity of the Sgt Pepper cover distracts from the simplicity of the scene itself: a graveside gathering of the great and ungood, called to bear witness to a resurrection of sorts.  Spiffingly fluorescent, transcendent of their former selves (who stand colourlessly waxworked to their right) the Beatles gather behind the gravestone-drum to whose beat Sergeant Pepper's Band, we suppose, living and/or dead, are ready to march; blooming 'Paul is Dead' clues - the bass guitar in yellow flowers that seems to spell out 'Paul?' being only the least obscure.

Death herself takes centre stage for in the album's climax, A Day in the Life, where a crowd of tabloid-led voyeurs gather to gawp at the blown-out brains of some lucky lord or other - but who then, moving backwards through time to another end, turn their backs on the victors of a war that has only just been won.  "But I", sings Lennon at his most sincere, "just had to look".  While it's "the news" that first draws the crowd and "a film" that keeps them there, it's only "having read the book" that lets Lennon transcend the tabloid concerns and see a deeper meaning in the devastation.  The gnostic-esoteric implications should, by now, be readily apparent.

Why were Frank and Harvey and Pookah all six feet tall?  Let me take you down, six feet underground.  Where are we going to?  Strawberry Fields, Wonderland, Tartarus - these invisible landscapes, these underground lands where no thing is real, where the dead are not dead and the light hides in the darkness...and what, after all, could ever be under the ground?  How can the atom be split?

"It was twenty years ago today that Sergeant Pepper taught the band to play"...  According to dead-Paul-lore, the 'Sergeant' is 'the Beast' - Aleister Crowley, the pop o'cculturalist who appears on the album cover at least once, and who died - that's right - in 1947, twenty years before the album's release - though not to the day (precision is relative) and in which case, let's celebrate this year as the third in another trilogy (45-47) with echoes of 66-68 as a time of paradigm explosion, marking the end of the Second World War, the start of the 'cold' war and the beginning of the atomic age.  Out of many, one.  In the United Kingdom, 1947 is also the foundational year of conspiracist touchstone the Tavistock Institute, whose supposed involvement in the transfiguration of the Beatles is a rabbit hole all of its own, leading us even further up the dubious path of evangelical Christian conspiracism, indeed a peculiarly American phenomenon: and yes over in the new world, 1947 marks history's most famous flying saucer crash and the unfolding of a conspiracist nexus with wider implications than any one agenda could ever encapsulate. [3]

47 mirrors 74, a year we have passed through before and is the year of John Lennon's own UFO encounter, a celebrity curiosity mined for all its worth by Uri Geller, sometime channel of the Nine, (who for Uri were, "a form of conscious computer, living aboard a spacecraft called Spectra") [4] which reminds us of Philip K Dick's Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) in the novel of the that name, wherein "real time" begins again, yes, in 1974.  Certain years have a special resonance whose meaning we are only beginning to unravel.  John Lennon's otherworldly 1974 experience left him in possession of a small golden egg, says Geller.  "When I touched it I felt a deep sadness - I don't know why - it was like a loneliness."  This resonant solitude of the alien encounter seems always to accompany the prophet who emerges from it, and is passed on in anxiety and love to his apostles, of Lennon, of Christ, of Carroll, of Rael, whomever, et cetera.  The 'Easter Egg' refers in contemporary parlance to the hidden gem, the nugget of truth, the part that explains the whole - or that leads us deeper down the hole, and into the dark.  But Easter is also the celebration of life transformed; of resurrection, enlightenment.  Life out of death, light out of darkness.  (Rabbits out of eggs?)  And after the resurrection, what then?  "He was taken up, and a cloud hid him from their sight". [5]

Now what?

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TWO

The associations of sleep with death, and of each of these with knowledge and revelation, is prominent not only through the non-empiricist traditions of philosophy - from the presocratics to the theosophists [1] - but beyond into the psychedelic and synchromystic traditions of our times. [2]  The fragments of Heraclitus refer repeatedly to sleep not as a absence of consciousness but as an alternative to it, as real and vivid as the waking state:

"The universe for those who are awake is single and common, while in sleep each person turns aside into a private universe". 

"During the night a man kindles a light for himself.  Just as when dead-but-alive, with sight extinguished, he contacts death, so when asleep-but-awake, with sight extinguished, he contacts sleep". 

"Dying is all we see when asleep; sleep is all we see when awake".

For Rudolph Steiner, the "dream experience" is something that takes place not only in an alternate state of consciousness but in an entirely different world:

"What dream experiences offer to thoughtful consideration is a multi-coloured interweaving of a picture world that conceals within it certain rules and laws.  This world of dreams seems to display an ebb and flow, often in confused succession.  In his dream life, the human being is freed from the law of waking consciousness that fetters him to sense-perception and to the rules governing his power of reason".

Why should it be that in sleep we are closer to death than in the wakeful state?  The implication is that being awake actually obstructs our view of the deeper reality - "death" -  not in the sense of the extinction of life but in the shamanistic sense of a mystical intercourse with the divine, outside of space and time.  Conscious life is a kind of death, which itself is a kind of a forgetting.  We must become "dead-but-alive" - we must "contact" death, and in doing so, contact life. [3]  

The Greek word ἅπτεται - lights up, contacts, kindles - in Heraclitus' association with fire, has clear shamanic connotations; likewise, Steiner's description of "dream life" as "freed from the law of waking consciousness" paints sleep as a kind preview of death, something to be mindful of at all times in the midst of waking life.

Parmenides, Heraclitus' contemporary, is known as the "founder of Western logic" - Socrates referred to him as "Father" but what we know today as 'logic' bears little resemblance to the thinking of the presocratic shamans.  Parmenides' journey takes us not into the rarefied air of cold abstraction but down into the land of the dead, of unreason - Tartarus, as far below the earth as heaven is above. [4]  His poem is presented as a divine revelation, [5] received through the shamanic practice of Hesychia and dictated by the goddess Persephone, wife of Hades and queen of the underworld but worshipped as well as the goddess of new life in spring. It is the same motif that runs from Parmenides' world through to ours: reason comes out unreason, life out of death.  "Life is a dream already over", wrote Kerouac. St Paul suggests a similar idea in 1 Corinthians 15:36-38 as part of his exploration of the nature of resurrection, Christianity's version of the spacetime-rupturing theophany:

"A seed must die before it can sprout from the ground.  Wheat seeds and all other seeds look different from the sprouts that come up.  This is because God gives everything the kind of body he wants it to have".

The use of an agricultural metaphor, for the Greek-fluent Paul, is worth noting.

In Philip K Dick's VALIS, Horselover Fat, who exists in the first and third persons as both narrator and protagonist - his name, we learn, being a Greek-German bastardization Philip ("lover of horses") Dick ("fat") - discovers that "the Empire never ended", that "real time ceased in 70 C.E. with the fall of the temple at Jerusalem [and] began again in 1974.  The intervening period was a perfect spurious interpolation aping the creation of the Mind".  It's an epiphanic moment:

“It was as if I had been shaking all my life, from a chronic undercurrent of fear.  Shaking, running, getting into trouble, losing the people I loved.  Like a cartoon character instead of a person, I realized.  A corny animation from the early Thirties.  In back of all I had ever done the fear had forced me on.  Now the fear had died, soothed away by the news I had heard.  The news, I realized suddenly, that I had waited from the beginning to hear; created in a sense, to be present when the news came, and for no other reason”.

It's this that puts poor Philip in league with Parmenides, Moses with Muhammed, Sun Ra with Rael, and so on. [6]  The theophany, the breaking through of the sacred into the profane, occurs to the prophet in solitude - at the summit of Mount Sinai, in the depths of Tartarus, aboard a UFO or at the end of long journey on back of the winged horse Al-Buraq.

Death - sleep - solitude - silence.   Peter Kingsley emphasises how the only description of any sound in Parmenides' poem comes through the Greek word Συρινξ (syrinx), referring to piping, whistling or hissing.  [7]  On his arrival in Tartarus, the initiate was to make a hissing sound, thus beginning, "the jounrey into a greater reality...a journey made through silence, in silence and into silence.  The noise of a syrinx is the ultimate password.  It's the sound of silence".  Of stillness.  Of what Kingsley describes as hesychia, the practice of shamanic incubation.  A state of sleep, of absolute stillness, of being dead - but alive.  It's a state of affairs that can only be described paradoxically.  Language is of the mortal world but silence is the sound of the other world: silence is the sound of God.  So to express the reality of God in words will always sound like contradiction; just as silence can not be expressed as sound.  "What can be shown, cannot be said".

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ONE

Playing records backwards to reveal hidden messages in the music is an idea from the first age of vinyl, when the record player was the principal medium of music's transmission. To reach into the machine and disrupt the revolution of the disc, to distort and reverse the sound, must have felt subversive - even miraculous - to the pre-digital listener. Reflect that this was a time when deference to "the album" still made sense; a time before the digital deconstruction of the idea that recorded music existed in an order - pressed in vinyl, set in stone - so reversing the spin of a  disc by hand must have had profane connotations even in the abstract. Then, when some tried to convince others that certain records contained actual communications from evil forces, the context was set already for the plausibility of this idea.  Of course, this ignores the existence of pareidolia and anyway, there is no reason to think that even if the music genuinely contains a backwards message, that the message will be absorbed when the music is played forwards. [1]  That's not the point though and still, hidden ("occult" in the non-silly-pseudo-satanic sense) messages in popular music remains a pervasive mythos, an idea worth exploring for its own sake. There is something unsettling about the sound of backwards language, whether spoken or sung - evocative of a rupture in the experience of time as a linear phenomenon - something that opens us to a less tangible, oneiric mode of awareness, in which apparently meaningless sounds can find their sense.

In their long and venerable tradition of getting things wrong, Fundamentalist Christians tend to understand backmasking as they understand the Bible - as a literal and linear phenomenon, something with a single message, a single author and a single purpose. But it's only in abandoning this way of thinking that we really come to understand what a sacred text is, and what it can do. A bible plays a role in an ancient culture that a "classic" artifact of pop music plays in ours; an embodiment of that sinister sceptre we call the zeitgeist; concentrated feedback loops and fragmentations of cultural consciousness riffing forever on each other for reasons any one participant in that culture can only begin to guess at. It is in being regarded as sacred that it attains its significance, its authority, and takes on its own life quite apart from whatever intention (if any) lay originally behind it.

Synchromysticism, the internet subculture that emerged in the mid-noughties, is a fascinating blurring of boundaries between rational and irrational thought, taking the best (and sometimes the worst) aspects of conspiracism, geek culture, Jungian psychology, wordplay, the superficially frivolous symbolism of pop culture and the occult and weaving them into a dense metanarrative for our hyper-accelerated, multimedia-saturated age.  As with backmasking, the reality - the truth - of what is going on is beside the point (or beyond our reach).   Appearances can be descriptive.

1997, the year of OK Computer's release, also saw the election of Tony Blair's "New Labour" Party to government in the UK, and the end the opposing Conservative Party's reign that had begun in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher's motley band of Friedmanite monetarists, what we know today as "neoliberals". The year marks the beginning of the end for those who ever hoped for a return to the post-war socialism of Atlee or his inheritors. Having famously abandoned its "Clause Four" just after Blair's election as their Leader, Labour rebranded itself "New Labour", becoming genuinely electable only through a lunge away from leftist ideology and into to the murky centre. For mainstream British politics, the last battle between capitalism and socialism that had existed in the West against the backdrop of the Cold War for almost as long as anyone could remember, had now been fought and won.

What happened?

Ironically enough, the new version of Clause Four actually described Labour as "socialist" party where its original version had not.  Practical to the core, it promised,

"To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service."

It's doubly ironic in fact, because, notwithstanding its purple post-Victorian expression, this is still incomparably more tangible than its 1995 replacement:

"The Labour Party is a democratic socialist party. It believes that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone, so as to create for each of us the means to realise our true potential and for all of us a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few, where the rights we enjoy reflect the duties we owe, and where we live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect."

"Common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange" is a defining principle of socialism: the idea being that the state regulates the labour market to ensure that it benefits those people, the "working class" who actually labour within it, allowing all classes of people to enjoy the benefits of organised civil society. Taken to extremes, this has taken the form of totalitarian communism, as occurred after the exuberance of the Russian and Chinese revolutions settled and solidified into the brutal dictatorships that rose up to perpetuate them. At the opposite extreme, we have the dominant political philosophy of our age - free market capitalism - under which the state is supposed to play as small a role as possible in the distribution of wealth, allowing markets to arrive at the best obtainable system of popular administration and control, to borrow the original Clause Four's phrasing. The battle lines are clear: for the left, it is government that sets us free; for the right, it is the market. British politics from 1945 to 1997, all things considered, was a pragmatic meandering across this spectrum.

"They don't speak for us..."

New Labour's replacement of Clause Four lays down no such solidly ideological lines, which is of course the whole point. After all, who doesn't believe that "by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone" in one context or another; and when the cosmetic frivolity of party-political bickering fades away, who doesn't want to "live together, freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect"? There is much to be said about this whole phenomenon of - what to call it?! - the "de-etymologisation", perhaps? - suffice it for now that what the election of New Labour represents, metafizzically speaking, is the triumph of a kind of post-ideological, post-semantic worldview, under which obfuscation is clarity, ideas are just words - war is peace, and ignorance is strength.

It's into and out of this world that OK Computer emerged, almost exactly 30 years after the release of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  It fell only six weeks after Blair's victory, a midsummer shower of marvelloustopia.  The lyrics are famously oblique - Thom Yorke described the album at the time as "polaroids in my head" [2] - transient, sickly but ethereal snapshots of a world where the ordinary human is "crushed like a bug in the ground", pestered by "unborn chicken voices" and just one of billions of "disappointed people clinging on to bottles" - but the most pervasive theme is that of sedation, an induced state of consciousness that's as welcome as the "pretty house" of No Surprises but probably never really desired - "a handshake of carbon monoxide" and certainly never voluntary.  The corollary of this chemical pessimism is the ecstasy of being, "born again...in the deep, deep sleep of the innocent...amazed that I survived" - or the desperation to be freed from the wreckage of "the air crash...'cos I'm your super hero".  In Exit Music (For a Film) Romeo-Yorke begs the listener to "wake from your sleep", for "today we escape". As the original Romeo put it before his own handshake with the quiet life, "I descend into this bed of death". [3]   "All the things we see when awake are death, even as the things we see in slumber are sleep", said Heraclitus.

To sleep: perchance to dream, ay, there's the rub - and it's the higher, gnostic associations of sleep with death, with timelessness (the "everlasting peace" of Exit Music's climax) and with the next world (war) that should draw our focus back to the idea of hidden meanings in mainstream events and artifacts.  If Blair's election in 1997 is the last nail in the coffin of ideology prefigured by the end of the Cold War (and, it was believed, the end of history) earlier that same decade, and if this timeless end of time took the form of some lapse into shared unconsciousness, then that would explain why OK Computer seems to echo so powerfully as if from some distant (but also imminent, and immanent) future into which we all, like idiots, may already have fallen.  As with the baskmasked salutations to the lords of the left hand path by pop culture's own deities, from what and into what we fell has yet to become clear.

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