KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by Higgs, JMR

  But now – forget him. He's gone.

  4: MAGIC AND MOORE

  Bill Drummond, as may already be apparent, is an unusual man.

  A good illustration of the odder aspects of his personality can be seen in a May 2012 interview he did with The Guardian's Tim Jonze. Jonze talked to Drummond about his attempts to turn simple acts into art. The example he quoted was how, when walking to and from a fishing spot, Drummond would walk in a route which, if drawn on a map, formed the outline of a fish.

  "It may be a form of OCD or just an attempt to give life more meaning than it seems to have," Drummond replied, "but as far back as I can remember I have had a habit of trying to create patterns in the games that I played or the things that I was doing. In my childhood this could be climbing 10 different trees before the sun passed the spire of the parish church or walking out the shape of a square on the map of our town when going to the shops and back to get the messages for my mum. I was never that interested in organised games or religion because someone else had already worked out what all the patterns were."

  While this does indeed sound like “a form of OCD”, it's worth putting it in the context of his Presbyterian upbringing. Drummond's father was a minister in The Church of Scotland and the strong work ethic of that faith runs through his career. It is particularly evident in the art that he has produced in the twenty-first century. Art for Drummond is not spontaneous carefree play, but work that needs to be scheduled and completed. The fact that Drummond is a fastidious grafter, by both nature and nurture, made him a potent subject to absorb Ken Campbell's ideas about achieving the impossible.

  Drummond also told Jonze that "using a word such as ritual may be too loaded for my liking, but I guess it is from these motivations in us that ritual is born. In the past dozen or so years, I have tried not to suppress or hide these urges in me and let them openly be the central driving force in my stuff."

  It is this aspect of his behaviour that has led to suggestions that his actions are not art, but magic. "[Bill] Drummond is many things," Charles Shaar Murray wrote in The Independent, "and one of those things is a magician. Many of his schemes [...] involve symbolically-weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades. Nevertheless, they are intended to have an effect on a world of people unaware that the act in question has taken place. That is magical thinking. Art is magic, and so is pop. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician..."

  Does Drummond view himself in this way? He doesn't make any claims to be consciously practicing a form of magic, or to have a significant interest in the subject. That said, the location of one screening of the film Watch The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid is suggestive.

  Most of the venues for these screenings were arts centres or clubs, although there were more unusual locations such as schools, jails and St. Michael’s Tower on top of Glastonbury Tor. One venue does jump out of the list of tour dates as distinctly different from the others, however. On 7th March 1996, they screened the film in Alan Moore's house in Northampton.

  Alan Moore is a comic book writer. He has been called the greatest ever comic book writer so often that it is most probably true. He found fame in the 1980s with works like V for Vendetta and Watchmen and continues to write prolifically in his native Northampton. Besides this work he is known for his disdain of Hollywood, his extraordinary beard, and for his interest in magic. It is this last point which appears to be why Moore was the only individual who the KLF actively sought out to screen the film for, in order to hear his opinion. If you want to know about magic in the modern era, Moore is the man to ask.

  To understand his take on the burning, however, we first need to grasp what Moore means by the slippery word 'magic'. The place to start is in the early days of his fame, when fans would turn up in droves at conventions and signings and ask him questions. One of the questions that kept coming up was, "where do you get your ideas from?"

  Most writers hate this question because they can't answer it. Like everyone else, Moore would fudge an answer as best he could. But unlike most writers he recognised that it was actually a very good question and one that he would very much like an answer to. Where did he get his ideas from? By now he had a family to support. Earning money for them depended on the regular arrival of new ideas, which he seemed to have no control over. What would he do if they stopped? Most writers fear even talking about this, seemingly scared that they may offend their muse and be robbed of their talent. If it works, they think, leave it alone and whatever you do don't ruin it. But this didn't sit well with Moore. His imagination was part of the tools of his craft. A taxi driver, for example, would know how to get under the bonnet of his car and repair it if it broke down. Shouldn't a working writer be able to do the same to their imagination?

  What is imagination? It is the creation of original thought from your own consciousness. But then, what is thought and what is consciousness? Here he ran into what is known as the 'hard problem' of neuroscience, how the experience of awareness springs from a lump of damp matter like a brain. If the cosmos is just a bunch of inanimate particles flung out of the chaos of a Big Bang, how exactly did it become aware of itself?

  Moore could not find anything approaching an answer to this. The beauty of science is that it strips the subjectivity and bias out of observation and allows us to probe the real world objectively. This is an elegant and extremely useful approach, but not one designed for understanding an intrinsically subjective process such as consciousness. Science can study neurons and brain matter. It can discover how they link together, how they grow, and how they fire electrical impulses at each other. But it cannot put a thought under the microscope. We can scan the brain and see what regions are active when a person looks at a field of grass, but we cannot isolate the experience of being aware of grass. We cannot find awareness, or store it, or cut it up and find out what it is made of. Many scientists, faced with this, take the view that consciousness doesn't actually exist; it is an illusion. This illusion is an emergent property of the brain. Patterns of activity across the billions of neurons in the brain fool the brain into believing that it is a 'mind', but that 'mind' has no actual existence in any real sense.

  This subject was a hot topic in the early 1990s following the publication of Daniel Dennett's remarkable book Consciousness Explained in 1991. The book skewered many of our false assumptions about how thought and the mind work. For many people, however, its argument collapsed at the final hurdle - the point when Dennett attempted to show that consciousness doesn't actually exist. The reader could hear Dennett's voice shifting in the book's final sections, becoming hectoring and bullying as his argument seemed to get weaker. To be fair to Dennett, this argument was always going to be a difficult sell. Most people, especially non-neuroscientists, reject the argument instinctively (his book is referred to as Consciousness Explained Away in certain circles, or Consciousness Ignored). This is especially true of those who have had experience of expanded states of awareness, such as heavy meditators. Moore was one of those who was unconvinced. He was damn sure that his consciousness existed.

  His argument went like this: Dennett's arguments were rooted in the impressive work of neurobiology. This in turn sits on some very solid foundations. Biology is supported by chemistry, which itself is supported by physics. We have a good understanding of these fields of study, and their conclusions look secure. But physics itself rests on the smaller scale world of quantum physics, and in quantum physics the world is affected by an observer – or in other words, consciousness. The train of logic that claims that consciousness doesn't exist, therefore, itself requires the existence of consciousness.

  We should be slightly cautious with this argument. Quantum physics is so alien and baffling that it can be trotted out by non-scientists to justify all sorts of freaky claims. In this instance we should be careful about what we mean when we refer to 'the observer'. In quantum physics, the observer is entangled with the observed i
n such a way that choices made by the observer can alter the object that is being observed. The passage of information between the pair is the important element here, but does the observer have to be 'conscious' as we understand it? When you put a cold thermometer in a glass of hot water, the thermometer both measures the temperature of the water but it also affects it: it cools it down a little. Here the final measurement produced is a product of both the observer and the observed, but a thermometer is not conscious, or if it is, it hides it well.

  Still, the need for awareness in an observer is a moot point. If it turns out not to be necessary, consciousness will hardly have been disproved, having instead wiggled out of the picture again. Regardless, Moore was satisfied with his own logic. He took the position that consciousness does actually exist. Ideas are real things. A different type of real, admittedly, but real nonetheless.

  Moore was mulling over these issues when he was writing From Hell in the early 1990s. From Hell – another of his masterpieces – is a dense, multi-layered examination of the Jack the Ripper legend, one which doesn't just concern itself with the crimes, but with the society they emerged from. Victorian London is evoked using psychogeography, a technique based on the derives of the Situationists in which the history and associations of places are understood to have an effect on those who visit them. Moore's Ripper is the royal surgeon Sir William Gull, who is murdering prostitutes to cover up a royal scandal but who realises that this 'work' has considerably greater implications and power.

  In one scene, Gull is eating with his coach driver. In the cause of the conversation Moore gives him the line, "The one place that gods unarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute, in all their grandeur and monstrosity." Having written the line, Moore later returned to it and thought it over. As far as he could see, if he was being honest with himself, what he had written was true. Try as he might, he wasn't able to produce an argument that honestly refuted the idea. This came as something as a shock.

  "The one place that Gods unarguably exist is in our minds where they are real beyond refute." If the line was true, what were the implications of it?

  Moore understood that while we assume that we live firmly in the real, physical world, in actuality we live in a mental model of that world. This model is produced by our minds based on memories and information from the senses. It is a very detailed and convincing model, so much so that it is difficult to accept how unreal it is. If you look at an object, for example, you see colour and assume that the object is that colour. But colour as we experience it is an invention of our minds which does not exist in the real world. It is a mental interpretation of whichever wavelengths of light the object we are looking at cannot absorb and so bounces back to us. This is something that the Buddhists worked out early on. They used to ask students "What makes the grass green?", and expected them to discover through meditation that the answer was themselves.

  But even if we accept that we only know the physical world through a mental approximation, we rarely acknowledge how much of the physical world is actually the product of the mental. For example, consider these words that you are reading – where did they come from? What about the language that they are written in? What about the shape of the letters themselves? What about the font? If you reading them on paper, then how is paper created, and where did the idea to create paper come from in the first place? If you are sitting in a chair, who designed that chair? Or the floor on which it sits? Look around the room that you are in. Is there anything there that didn't first appear as an idea in the head of another person? Think about the aims of the job you do or the ideology of your preferred political party. Think about the recipes of the food you eat or the music you listen to. The world we actually live in is made of ideas that have left human minds and entered the physical world. Indeed, the story of our evolution is essentially the story of us retreating from the natural world into the mental one.

  The reason we have a hard time understanding this, Moore realised, is because we lack a model of what the mental world is. The 'I' of awareness is our blind spot, to the extent that the consciousnesses of some of our cleverest and best educated minds, such as Dennett, will deny that consciousness even exists. The first task in getting a grip on the world of ideas, Moore thought, was to create a practical model to describe and understand it.

  Moore set out to build a model of the mental world, a place sometimes referred to as the noosphere but which Moore calls Ideaspace. As the '...space' part of his name implies, he chose a spatial metaphor. This seemed reasonable, he thought, for we naturally talk of ideas being at the back of our minds or at the forefront of our thinking, we can be deep or high-minded, and so forth. Ideas, then, were placed in a 'space' in this model. The ideas could be small or large; our most detailed and complicated ideas, such as religions, ideologies or Robert Anton Wilson's self-referential reality tunnels might make up entire continents of Ideaspace. Where this differs from the physical world, however, is that the normal rules of time and space do not apply. Lands End and John O'Groats, for example, are physically very separate in the real world, but very close in Ideaspace because they are so often linked in our thinking. In a similar way, we can just as easily think of something that is happening now, something that happened a few years ago or imagine what will happen in the future. Ideas in this model are connected more like hyperlinks on the internet than geographical locations in the real world. This concept of being linked via connections rather than geography is, of course, similar to how neuroscientists view the storage of memories.

  So far, so uncontroversial. But where this becomes interesting is when we consider our own relationship to that world. Moore thought that we each had our own little corner of Ideaspace, our own home in the mental land. Something personal like Drummond's idea of Echo would live in Drummond's own section of Ideaspace. Many ideas, however, are shared, and while we may have our own personal version of them, they are more usefully said to exist in communal space. Concepts such as ‘Madonna’, ‘Sherlock Holmes’ or ‘Hitler’, for example, are shared by almost everybody. For Moore, these communal ideas existed beyond our own personal corners of the mental world.

  Could we then wander out of our little territories, go further afield and explore the rest of Ideaspace? Here Moore's model is describing something very similar to Jung's collected unconscious. Moore thought that yes, we could open the doors of our individual homes and walk out into this shared landscape beyond. Indeed, he thought that artists had to, for it was their job to wander furthest from their own patch of the imagination and return with truly rare and exotic ideas which they had to use and make something out of. In this way the world we live in becomes increasingly changed by the mental world.

  It is this process – the way thoughts exist and alter the world – that Moore uses the word 'magic' to describe.

  What Moore had done was to raise the importance of the mental world of imagination and lower that of the physical. Indeed, you could argue that he has reversed them, claiming more importance for the imagination than the physical to the extent where the physical world is the product of the mental. This approach, in which the material is dependent on the immaterial, echoes Charles Fort’s belief that, "A tree cannot find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time.” This was the phenomena of why, after millennia of inventions such as the electric light, calculus or steam engines not existing, several people would invent the exact same thing at much the same time (at which point there’s a mad race down to the patent office, with the winner celebrated by history and the others forgotten). As Moore saw it, the idea had been discovered in a shared area of Ideaspace, and several wanderers had stumbled upon it shortly afterwards.

  Moore then took this one stage further, and it is at this stage that the model becomes more controversial. When biological things in the physical world evolve to a certain level of complexity, they become living
, conscious, self-determined individuals. Could the same be true for ideas in the non-physical world? Could sufficiently complex ideas evolve into a form of life, and wander Ideaspace as they saw fit? If this was the case, it would explain all those stories of ghosts, aliens, fairies, angels, elves, giant invisible rabbit spirits, the Goddess Eris and all the other unreal creatures that appear throughout cultures and history. This idea would be a leap of faith for most people, but it was a leap that Moore took. Moore has said that he and his friend Steve Moore conjured up a demon in his living room around this time and had a long conversation with it. First-hand experience such as this would no doubt make that leap easier to make.

  Carl Jung had also made a similar leap, although his terminology was different. In 1913 he had been troubled by a recurring dream that was both sinister and disturbing. He dreamt of a terrible flood that covered "all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps." In this flood, which stretched from England to Russia, he saw "yellow waves, swimming rubble and the death of countless thousands." When the dream re-occurred, it was accompanied by an 'inner voice' which said, "Look at it, it is completely real, and it will come to pass. You cannot doubt this."

  When the First World War followed, Jung had no choice but to see his dream vision as a premonition. For a scientist, this was deeply troubling. It challenged him to come up with a theory or explanation as to how a major event in world history could have been represented in his mind before it had actually happened. This trail of thought would lead, decades later, to his theories on the 'acausal connecting principal' of synchronicity. For our purposes, however, we should note that such an occurrence fits Moore's model of mental phenomena. The contents of Moore's Ideaspace exist outside of the physical world's relationship to time. Events that are about to happen - or rather, the idea of events that are about to happen - could well be discovered in this immaterial realm by deep wanderers such as Jung. Although these events have yet to occur in the physical world, the idea of them may be found forming, like an early warning alarm, in this strange mental landscape that Moore calls Ideaspace and Jung called the collective unconscious.