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The predilection of the CIA and FBI for film metaphors and similes when rewriting inconvenient testimony bears remark. Two examples:
1) In mid-1964, the CIA used two editions of a short-lived magazine Canadian magazine – entitled, with characteristic irony, Liberty - to rewrite the eyewitness testimony of an Elm Street eyewitness called Norman Similas. His initial testimony had appeared in late editions of the Toronto Star on the evening of November 22. I won’t bore you with the details of that original description. Suffice to say, it bore no relation whatever to the Liberty version. What is germane in this context is how the Agency had recourse – and not for the first or last time – to metaphors and similes derived from film in the course of the rewrite:
Quote:“More than seven months have passed since the horrors of Dallas. Never a day passes but what the projector has not flipped in my mind, and the scenes tumble out in sequence after sequence…There is a fade out and I’m next standing…*”
[*Extracts from Norman Similas, as told to Ken Armstrong, “The Dallas Puzzle: Part 1,” Liberty, July 15, 1964, p.20, as reproduced in Harold Weisberg’s Photographic Whitewash: Suppressed Kennedy Assassination Pictures (Self-published: Frederick, Md., 1976)]
2) Another fine specimen of the technique is to be found in the FBI version of the testimony of Nina Rhodes, an eyewitness to the murder of RFK. Interviewed on July 8, 1968, Rhodes only discovered the extent to which her G-man interlocutor had falsified her observations in 1992. In amongst the fabrications, we find this little gem:
Quote:“Everything appeared to her like still frames in a stop-action movie…”*
[*William Klaber & Philip H. Melanson. Shadow Play: The Untold Story of the Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (NY: St. Martin’s Press, paperback edition, June 1998), p.141]
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Perhaps a short course in film and video production and technique is in order for today's citizenry; Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin comes to mind, and others.
Jeff wells' new (long overdue) blog entry at Rigorous Intuition 2.0 has this tidbit:
"The Ku Klux Klan, let's remember, didn't burn crosses until they saw it depicted in Birth of a Nation. And the art of persuasion has come only a long way since.”
I'd bet brioche against titanium that the security agencies of the empire have acquired and embedded the skills and knowledge, the tools and techniques, into their daily output.
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
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Ed Jewett Wrote:Perhaps a short course in film and video production and technique is in order for today's citizenry; Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin comes to mind, and others.
Jeff wells' new (long overdue) blog entry at Rigorous Intuition 2.0 has this tidbit:
"The Ku Klux Klan, let's remember, didn't burn crosses until they saw it depicted in Birth of a Nation. And the art of persuasion has come only a long way since.”
I'd bet brioche against titanium that the security agencies of the empire have acquired and embedded the skills and knowledge, the tools and techniques, into their daily output.
I concur about film fraud now being de rigeur for the spooks, Ed, but can't help marvelling at the crassness of the literary attempts above to refashion eyewitness testimony in accord with the preferred narrative. For some irrational reason, I'd always expected it to be the other way round. Just goes to show, believe what you find, not what you expect!
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Ah, well, let me finish my post-graduate work in psychology first (and would someone please buy me a copy of that new book by Jung?) :hmmmm2:
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
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Ed Jewett Wrote:Ah, well, let me finish my post-graduate work in psychology first (and would someone please buy me a copy of that new book by Jung?) :hmmmm2:
$115 bucks (USD) on Amazon, The Holy Grail of the Unconscious .... pre-order only. I suspect the book will be out within 2 weeks....
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At that price, I will have to wait for the used market prices to go down, or the comic book version to come out.
Or perhaps I could befriend a psychiatrist ... oh, wait ... 
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
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Probably, and not on the lab floor.
I would love to read the Red Book. I will have to put the suggestion of its acquisition deep into my reticular activating system.
And this is getting me very interested in furthering my education and research in things Jungian now that I am Oldian.
A very cursory and rapid Google search turns up these direct cut-and-pastes:
"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Tom Wolfe describes the classic experiment in which Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, under the influence of LSD, explore manifestations of synchronicity by listening to a recording of a drug-induced monologue while watching the Ed Sullivan Show. Also, the central goal of the psychedelic movement, opening the doors of perception, is repeatedly associated with Jungian concepts throughout the book."
"Hofmann called LSD "medicine for the soul" and was frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. "It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis," he said.... "
"In one procedure, which was developed in European clinics and given the name psychotytic therapy, moderately strong doses of LSD are administered in several successive sessions at regular intervals. Subsequently the LSD experiences are worked out in group discussions, and in expression therapy by drawing and painting. The term psycholytic therapy was coined by Ronald A. Sandison, an English therapist of Jungian orientation and a pioneerof clinical LSD research. The root -lysis or -lytic signifies the dissolution of tension or conflicts in the human psyche."
What I was looking for was evidence of their knowing one another or having collaborated in some way some where.
The transcendentalists all knew one another, and many American literary giants were close friends and associates, and often spent time climbing Mount Greylock.
It would seem two explorers of the internal mind might take a trip together.
This reminds me of one such trip to Mount Greylock in which my companion asked me, on Route Two West some time after we had filled eaten our very small lunch, asked me what the definition of 'nebulous' was, and I answered 'By definition, it has none."
"Where is the intersection between the world's deep hunger and your deep gladness?"
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Ed Jewett Wrote:At that price, I will have to wait for the used market prices to go down, or the comic book version to come out.
Or perhaps I could befriend a psychiatrist ... oh, wait ...
I've been waiting since 1st January 2000, for the "Red Book" to be published and if I have to dig roads or paint the Forth bridge (fortunately neither options are essential) I'll buy the book. It was written into Jung's Will that the book not be published until the year 2000 and I was chasing the editor for publication, but in 2005 after successive delays gave up of ever seeing it.
Jung didn't have to drop Acid David. It would've been interesting if he had, I'm sure. But there are several ways to safely enter and exit the Collective Unconscious and Jung developed his own method of doing so (I'm fairly sure he cobbled together techniques of middle ages Alchemists from his deep research of that subject). The key word here is "safely" as, after all, once doesn't want to spend time honing a technique to suddenly find on the first outing that you're in the middle of the likes of a psychotic episode.
And since it will now sound as if I have dropped Acid, I think I'll retreat.
But that book is mine!
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Carl Jung - Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14
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I have just received my copy of Liber Novus/The Red Book. It is huge (bigger and heavier than a Chef's chopping board and thus not easy to hold and read - but it can be managed with a bit of thought.
The book comes in two parts. The first parts is a faithful reproductions of Jung's handwritten Red & Black books that are beautifully presented and which are full of magnificent paintings and illuminated copper-plate script, minature paintings and large haunting and wonderful paintings. The text is in copper-plate hand in German, Latin and Greek (so far as I can make out anyway). The second part is a painstaking English translation of the first part with numerous and intriguing references and bookmarks.
It is clear from my early reading thus far that this book was Jung's diary of his personal interactions with his Soul and Spirit of the Depths and completely details his inner journey throughout his life. The book is incomplete in that being what it was it could never be completed. The last few pages are prepared for illuminations and small paintings with the text already in place but the illuminations were only partially completed or not completed at all.
For those who can afford to pay (or justify) the $100 odd cost (and for me it a one-off exception) I highly recommend it, as it provides a unique, fascinating and enlightening insight into the inner journey of one of the great men of the 20th century.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Carl Jung - Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14
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