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(Page 1 of 16) Uncharted by Leigh Blackmore
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UNCHARTED
Imagine this:
Islands in a sea of blue. Brilliant sunshine. Yellow sands. The scent of coconut mingling with ozone. No sound except a gentle breeze rustling the leafy crowns of palm-trees. Cascades of colourful flowers with wide blooms like faces upturned to the sky.
OK? Not too difficult? Then you won't have any trouble imagining the rest of what I'm about to tell you.
1. Ash
Adrian Ash considers himself a magician, so you suppose he is one. You remember him quoting Crowley in justification for having interests so diverse: "The Magician must build all that he has into his pyramid; and if that pyramid is to touch the stars, how broad must be the base! There is no knowledge and no power which is useless to the Magician".
Others know (as well as you) how interested Ash seems to be not just in anthropology, architecture, and cognitive science, but also in artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, all of which he referred to occultism on some level.
You find it difficult to believe he could actually have understood these subjects in the depth required to work seriously in them. And indeed, from month to month he blithely abandons one for another.
Ash is fond of the Suprematists. He has a reproduction of Malevich's most famous painting, Black Square, on his wall. His life, like the painting, is a work whose meaning and function is in constant flux.
He admires literary critic Northrop Frye, especially that unrealised project known as the ‘Third Book'. He loves the fact that Frye's ambition for this ‘Third Book' was for it to become no less than ‘a symbolic guide to the entire universe'.
"It's friggin' incredible," Ash says to you, knocking back another longneck of Little Creatures beer. The table is littered with bottles of this beer, which you have emptied between you in the course of an afternoon of speculation and boozy camaraderie. Beneath the table, Ash's moth-eaten-looking cat slinks around, rubbing its head on the corner posts. "The work he envisioned contemplated the ways in which myth and metaphor are the keys to all verbal structure. What a concept, eh?"
The burnt end drops unnoticed from his cigarette, like a leprous appendage too rotten to stay attached to its body.
You can see he really loves this idea.
"Do tell," you say, flippantly. Okay, he has taught you a lot, his approach just seems very scattergun. Tonight you're not really in the mood. To be honest, of late you can't absorb half of what he talks about.
You are somewhat adrift, have been for some time. And you're vague at the best of times. You would never have your own phone number. You would take a VCR in for repair or apply for a credit card. "Your phone number sir?" they would ask. "Oh – I have only just moved in". You have been two years at your current address; you're just not any good at remembering, and can't organise yourself to carry the number in your wallet.
You leave Ash that night talking, as though into a void, of the neurobiological roots of cognition.
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