Tag Archives: reincarnation

book report: War As I Knew It (General Patton)

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A book published shortly after General Patton’s death, drawn from his war memoirs. It’s full of passages like this:

I decided to attack Casablanca this day with the 3d Division and one tank battalion. It took some nerve, as both Truscott and Harmon seemed in a bad way, but I felt we should maintain the initiative. Then Admiral Hall came ashore to arrange for naval gunfire and air support and brought fine news. Truscott has taken the airfield at Port Lyautey and there are forty-two P-40’s on it. 

That is, solid workmanlike prose and a matter-of-fact, cool approach. I dare say the book would mean more to a military historian, however it’s perfectly engaging for the layman. There are some amusing moments, e.g. in Sicily:

The Mayor of the town, who was by way of being an archeologist, took me to look at these temples. When we came to the temple of Hercules, which was the biggest but in the worst state of repair, I asked him had it been destroyed by an earthquake. He said, “No General, it was an unfortunate incident of the other way.” When I asked which was the other war, he said that this temple was destroyed in the Second Punic War.

These moments take on more significance in the light of Patton’s apparent past life memories:

For all his bluff, no-nonsense manner Patton saw things in historical depth:

Furthermore, he sanctioned my plan to cross the XX Corps at Melun and Fontainebleau and the XII Corps at Sens. It was evident that when these crossings were effected, the Seine and Yonne became useless to the Germans as military barriers. The Melun crossing is the same as that used by Labienus with his Tenth Legion about 55 B.C.

He has the war-eye for detail, an appreciation for sound tactics:

Just east of Le Mans was one of the best examples of armor and air co-operation I have ever seen. For about two miles the road was full of enemy motor transport and armor, many of which bore the unmistakable calling card of a P-47 fighter-bomber – namely, a group of fifty-caliber holes in the concrete. Whenever armor and air can work together in this way, the results are sure to be excellent. 

For all Patton’s deep theoretical and historical learning, he has a pragmatic closeness to things, a tactile simplicity: 

He also said, and this was more to the point, that the easiest way through the Siegfried Line was the Nancy Gap. I had come to this same conclusion from a study of the map, because, if you find a large number of big roads leading through a place, that is the place to go regardless of enemy resistance. It is useless to capture an easy place that you can’t move from. 

Not to mention a ruthless, clear-sighted approach:

On the sixteenth, Stiller, Codman, and I drove to Chartres, which had just been taken by Walker whom we met at the bridge, still under some fire. The bridge had been partly destroyed by a German hiding in a fox hole who pulled the detonator and blew the bridge, killing some Americans, after the leading elements had passed. He then put his hands up and surrendered. The Americans took him prisoner, which I considered the height of folly.

Only Patton could write something like this:

Christmas dawned clear and cold; lovely weather for killing Germans, although the thought seemed somewhat at variance with the spirit of the day.

One can see why some speculate that Patton reincarnated as Donald J. Trump. While the lives are in many respects very different – the New York businessman and the career soldier – a man like Patton most likely bore a multifacted, deep soul, which could just as easily manifest as a foul-mouthed, impolitic soldier, or a foul-mouthed, impolitic politician – both of genius, in their respective fields. And certainly, Patton’s ivory-handled revolvers are a very Trumpian touch.

time travel and memory

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Big Dick Anon has been delving into time travel:

Good to be back in the jungle. Folks are really excited and the wood chipper has been tested on several of Maduro`s followers.The Gold Miners and Crime lords have split up many of the spoils and interestingly enough they plan on fixing the country and helping a lot of people Maduro has been fucking over for a long time. They really hate the Iranians and the Cubans. Suspect the oil seizure will set things off. With the Capital going dark soon there after and Maduro being well dealt with. China is fucked. They are trying to flood the country to save the dam but they have made mistakes in their diversion systems and with pending earthquakes well enjoy the ride. Time travel, the beginning point is to understand the underlying meaning of Aristotle`s discussion of time in his work. “The Physics”. From here realize time is an internal issue as much as an external one. And there are a number of ways to make the journey. Also consider that language is a complete failure in dealing with time and to look beyond language and simply gaze into the darkness. For example there are individuals who have made the journey by overcoming the limitations that many folks place on themselves. Think in terms of the imagination as the trigger added to stimulation. For example Patton well these comments are simply a statement of fact.

Others have been known to have an inclination to time travel. There is something inherently in their chemistry that triggers a rip in space and time that allow them to move in time much the same way most folks simply move in the present. There exists in a Cherokee family several folks who have this gift. In fact one member was a pilot in WWII and at the Battle of Midway simply disappeared in mid-flight to reappear in California in 1849. And later recruited at Harvard by a very special group. And the gates. Later with photos of this family. Business calls.

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Well, that’s a lot to digest. It occurs to me, what if memory is essentially time/space travel? – that we are not accessing a record stored in the brain, computer-style, but rather the brain using stored traces as a jumping-off-point to time/space travel, so we actually witness e.g. our first day at school once more? If we can take the present as the atomic moment in which our entire spiritual being & force is made physically real, so our physical reality is a taut concrete blip in the ocean of the immaterium, then future projection and memory enact a commerce with spiritual realities.

In which case, a traumatic memory still stings because you are actually literally moving in time & space to the original moment & location, and as it were through a glass darkly perceiving & experiencing that grief once more. You are not merely “remembering”, but re-experiencing.

When we remember, do we retroactively alter? Is the original experience coloured by the superimpositions of futurity? Could there be moments when we feel not merely the experience itself, but also how we will remember it? – a question to some degree touched upon in Geoff Dyer’s magnificent The Missing of the Somme. Could there be a numinous quality to our pivotal experience? – especially in my first year at university, I lived a double life, richly, feeling very much that the people I met, the situations in which I found myself, the daily beauties & splendours & miseries of my first maturation, were already written in a novel that many would read and re-read. I felt to be living within a grand story.

In this manner, one could perhaps engineer events to attract future remembrance. For example, 9/11.

The event will both generate & absorb imaginal force, in the form of attention, intense emotion, remembrance, speculation. This may well be the purpose of ritual – to consciously create a nexus. By this means, you attract & exploit human imaginal power, extending into the far future; you alter the weave of reality itself: presumably it would be possible to create an inner architecture to the event, to use that imaginal power to specific ends, to exalt a specific non-human intelligence if so desired.

For the evil elites, the figure known as Satan has long been one such entity.

But if there are such evidently malign entities and ceremonies, there must be a contrary.

I think this is one purpose of Q-anon: to craft a benign, alternate event, a “great awakening”. There is an imaginal, one could say “magickal” quality to Q, a sense of the spiritual significance to our times. I would love to know if someone in Q-team has delved deeply into chaos magick; if the American military have, in fact, been experimenting with the immaterium for some time, and identified a malignant non-human sentience (Satan) as an active agent within the Cabal’s machinations & workings. If so, one could hardly pick a better figure than Donald Trump to create a benign counter-narrative & imaginal reality; a man deeply aware of corruption & creation, a man in some ways so utterly ordinary as to be incorruptible, so utterly egotistical as to be always independent of the kind of influence wielded by evil, so utterly humorous and ironic, so like a child in some respects, a true innocent though wise.

book report: Cloud Atlas

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David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: another of the books I’m reading so I can throw it away before I leave Germany. It was a gift from a friend and for a long time I thought, I will never read this undoubted shite, based mostly on the cover

I’ve had enough fokcen horrible experiences with “bestsellers” which turn out to be okay but forgettable (Netherland), supposedly hilarious but actually dull (Rancid Aluminium), tediously well-crafted & lifeless (The Little Friend), pretentious, unconvincing, and badly-researched (Tree of Smoke), “creative writing workshop exemplar” (Enduring Love), wearyingly insubstantial (Birdsong), quite fun but nothing more (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin), boring pastiche (The Unconsoled), depressingly pointless & joyless (2666), competent but somehow meagre (The Plot Against America), aggressively unpleasant (The Wasp Factory), disappointingly trivial (Possession).

So I was quite surprised by Cloud Atlas. It’s very good. Not sure I’d re-read it but then I mostly only re-read poetry, philosophy and beyond-very-good fiction. The structure is initially confusing: it begins with the journal of a lawyer at sea in the 1800s, cuts to the letters of a young musician in the 1920s, then a journalist in the 70s, an elderly publisher in the present, then some sci-fi future of Blade Runner-esque androids, then lastly a post-apocalyptic future of rape and cannibalism. There is a connection running throughout, so the musician finds the lawyer’s journals, the journalist meets the recipient of the musician’s letters, the publisher receives a novel by or based on the journalist’s tale, and so on. The connective ligaments are not so explicit as to render great satisfaction to the more obvious reader; indeed, I found myself wondering just what manner of underlying structure there was, beyond a birthmark common to each time-segment and the overlapping narrations, so something of each protagonist (journal, letters, novel, film, video) is encountered in the next sequence; but this is not, in itself, very satisfying.

I think that while the film trailer talks about love and redemption and what not, the real connective matter is connection itself – it’s not a story about love or heroism or anything of that sort; it says rather: “each life & time is connected to others, in some manner”.

Mitchell has a stammer and an autistic son, suggesting that connection, coherence, fluidity, does not come naturally in his world. Had he created a more coherent ligature, perhaps I would have thought it a great novel; as it is, it’s possible I would re-evaluate, were I to read it a second time, and I enjoyed the prose and situations so much I dare say I will read it again, in a few years. The ultimate test of a novel isn’t “does it have profound meaning” but rather “did you enjoy it”. Balls to profundity if it gives no pleasure.

My own sense of slight disappointment most likely comes from my own odd perspective; that is, I remember fragments of another (relatively recent) life and have been told of others. Mitchell seems to be hinting at reincarnation as the underlying structure; but I noted none of the similitudes & ironies of our many lives – the characters of Cloud Atlas seemed to bear no real kinship, beyond a certain outsider, often outcast role in society. The only novel I know which uses reincarnation as a plot device, and comes very close to the reality, is Katherine Kerr’s Deverry series, especially the first four books. But since Mitchell does no more than hint, I can hardly criticise him for something he probably didn’t intend.

And there is a passage – which I failed to mark – where one character says something like “I would like a map by which to guide myself here, a map of the ephemeral and vague, the constantly shifting forces of our destinies & purpose, an atlas of the clouds” (my wording, as I can’t find the original now). It’s very modern in the sense of pointlessness, of history as a mechanical process within which we are churned up & destroyed, from life to life. It is, in a sense, accurate: there seems (as far as I can judge) no linear progression to reincarnation, no divinely-ordained karma; but there is certainly more structure and purpose than one would think from this excellent and enjoyable novel.