SIGMA PORTFOLIO No.5 (1965)

SIGMA GENERAL INFORMATION EXISTENTIAL CONSULTANTS

“Man is born to live not to prepare for life” Boris Pasternak

It is the present which must be seized, this present:

I can clean the white man’s dirt all the time. I work for four families and some I don’t care for and some I like. And when I got home and later when the trouble began, something happened to me. I went on the roof to see what was going on. I don’t know what it was. But hearing the guns I felt like something was crawling in me, like the whole damned world was no good, and the little kids and the big ones and all of us was going to get killed because we don’t know what to do. And I see the cops are white and I was crying. Dear God. I am crying! And I took this pop bottle and it was empty and I threw it down on the cops, and I was crying and laughing.

Woman in Harlem Riots 1964

Her Present. My present. Your present. Our present. Now.

Quite frequently, someone asks me: “When is this sigma project of yours going to begin?” Sometimes the tone in which the words are uttered is patronising, sometimes it is humble enough if transparently incredulous, and sometimes the intent is an out-and-out jibe, but, regardless of how they are spoken, the implication is clear. The questioner is thinking in terms which preclude his comprehending precisely what it is some of my contemporaries and myself are in the process, individually and in concert, of discovering ourselves to be about.

For, Sigma is a word referring to something which is quite independent of myself or any other individual, and if we are correct in our historical analysis, we must regard it as having “begun” a long time ago. My own relation to it (or anyone else’s) goes back several decades before it occurred to us to propose as a conscious tactical measure the adoption of the linguistic convention.

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Time is running out. At one time, two thousand years ago, time was running out for the Roman Empire, and long before that time was running out for the great civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates. But this is in some senses a misleading way of expressing what happened: to speak in terms of the rise and fall of successive civilizations is to accept an historical convention. In doing so, we tend at the same time to lose sight of that long “night” of prehistory, beside which the history of the last ten thousand years is relatively inconsiderable, That is to say, what went on before recorded history is the larger part of the evolution of mankind, and it is the process which stretches far back into that inscrutable past, and not simply some latter-day formal expression of it, that is threatened with obliteration today. Because the Roman Empire as an historical form disintegrated in the early centuries of the Christian era, the reality that was the Roman Empire, or what the historical form “contained”, did not therefore cease to exist. Men and women in general continued to make love in the same houses of the same streets of the same cities in the same lands. But the destruction with which our present civilization is threatened is no formal thing, such that some future historian will say: “Western civilization collapsed towards the end of the twentieth century and…etc..”. On the contrary, there will be no “and” and no “etc”, and no “future historian”. What is threatened is no way of life but the existential process, the very evolving substance we know as human life itself. That is why we cannot suffer gladly those fools who derive reassurance from historical parallels.

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Begin here and now. The external world as. it is, the various institutions expressive of the total situation within which they have evolved. No naive pre-Marxian analysis is adequate. Tout etant lié, il fallait tout changer par une lutte unitaire, ou rien (G.E.Debord). If you want to change things, to alter radically the relationship between man and woman, between man and society, you go a very strange way about it if you proceed in such a way that, directly or indirectly, you reaffirm the validity for now of institutions which are the effective substructure of the status quo. If you want to knock “newspapers” for their irresponsibility, for their having allowed a “newsworthy” pseudo-reality to come into existence, a complex pseudo-reality in relation to which men and women respond and get their kicks and indulge their fears, a pseudo-reality which bears little resemblance to the actual human predicament as expressed for example by the woman in Harlem, you don’t go about it by starting another “newspaper”. Print it certainly, and if you must call it something, call it The Rolling Times and roll it on toilet paper out of skyscraper windows.

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We wish to change things? Then we must think new and make it new. We must invent effective behavioural procedures which negate the status quo in form as well as in content. We must exploit loop-holes in the system, underground ways of getting to the people and making them think. We have to remember at all times there is no personal enemy, that the only “enemy” is non-personal: spiritual ignorance breeding fear, hysteria, schizophrenia.

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Revolution following repression is often followed by repression. The proposition is none the less true for having been screamed from the throats of fools. Again the external world is changing of it own momentum. Factories move towards automation and the holy proletariat, when it is finally deprived of its raison-d’etre, what is it but an anachronism? So much for hard work. Which is fit for machines only. And always was, except in the mouths of hypocrites who found it profitable to make a virtue of others’ underprivilege. Work does not ennoble and never did. Experience ennobles. Living fully. Applying oneself to life. And that is art and craft and consciously becoming, not work. Correspondingly, leisure will have no meaning that is not already contained in the gracious life. The problem will be for the individual to live a gracious life in a world of other people. Not necessarily for them, nor against them, but with them. This attitude, these thoughts, are at bottom of the contemporary interest in the “happening”, an existential situation in which the protagonists adopt a metacategorical posture and play at discovering themselves, together, at leisure, freedom unrestricted by external constraints. What are the possibilities of the leisure situation? What are its dangers?

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We might say that Sigma began when a few men sometimes together here and there about the world, and more and more evidently with the passing of the Century, began to take stock. And that stock did not tally at all with the “stock” in which they had been persistently led to believe. Now, in the past two decades more than ever, we have recognised certain symptoms in other lands and amongst people everywhere of a growing urge to have done with self-deceit, and insané public hypocrisies. The modern thinkers, artists and poets to whom we refer are the encylopaedists of a revolution of far greater import than the one centring in the Place de Ja Bastille at the end of the 18th Century, to some extent, perhaps, because they have had the good fortune to number the Marquis de Sade amongst their inspirations. The Divine Marquis taught us among other things that obscenity was a state of mind, my mind, not of any body. And yet our newspapers still treat seriously those infantile scenes in court in which an unenlightened magistrate has the right to be the judge of things he is congenitally (and by virtue of an archaic legal terminology) precluded from understanding.

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We might say it is the object of Sigma to bring all informations out into the open, to expose that trick of projection in terms of which good citizens locate evil without themselves in the criminal; that it is the object of Sigma to attack such stock responses that paralyse social intercourse and make it nearly always frivolous, to make men conscious of their conditions.

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It is happening all over the world. As Engels said: Men make their own history themselves, but in a given environment which conditions them. Only those who are able to comprehend these conditions and exploit them are responsible to their own biographies. It is to those we address ourselves. “We have the theoretical instruments and we can establish a method” (R.D.Laing and David Cooper). A metacategorical method.  The method underlying some of Joan Littlewood’s experiments, and  Burroughs’s, Laing’s  post-Sartrean psychotherapeutical techniques, the Meat Science Essays of M.McClure. What Brecht was at during the last years. It is the fact that I could go on listing happenings instinct with the same principle amongst men of many professions everywhere that is the basis of our tentative optimism.

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The problem…to speak as neutrally as possible…is to alert, sustain, inform, inspire, and make vividly conscious of itself all intelligence everywhere from now on. We have been experimenting with certain techniques which seem peculiarly relevant to the contemporary situation, ways of circumventing conventional channels of disseminating informations, pamphleteering, potlatch etc. Simultaneously, we are contemplating the creation of a London “box-office”. You can’t give anything away successfully in a capitalist orientated economy, anything new that is: you have to “sell” it. Thus, irrespective of what it is we have to put in circulation, and as a certain amount of cash or kind will be necessary if we are to operate at all, a box-office of sorts seems to be a reasonable practical first step.

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There are a number of precedents for the thing we have in mind. There is-our early collaborator, W.Berman, whose “place”, first in Los Angles and then in San Francisco, operated successfully on “collections”; that is, he paid the rent. This is not the place to describe Berman’s activities except to say that whatever they are we suspect we subscribe to them.There was our own experience in Venice, California, where our pilot shop-conversion became the seed of the so-called “beat scene” of Venice West.

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A place, then, in London, to be found in the immediate future. From the beginning, we shall regard it as our living-gallery-workshop-auditorium-happening situation where conferences and encounters are to be undertaken, contact with the city made, and where some of our techniques, found objects, futiques, and publications can be exhibited. It will be our window on the metropolis, a sigma-centre where our expanding index is housed, and a kind of general operations’ base for the whole project. The place is a salon, but a salon which doesn’t exist to express a fashion, but to inspire a valid manner of comportment. What is “for sale” in this place is a tonic ambience; it is a kind of cultural Turkish baths, in which (eventually, when a legal solution has been found) a man can smoke hashish or opium at will and have communion with god and his peers, an experimental situation in which what is happening cannot be described in terms of conventional categories (which it transcends), in which “anything that chains life to preconceived goals and preconceived reality”, in the words of M.McClure, “must go —they threaten the meat itself”.

There will be music and laughter. The scene will be permanent, with no opening and closing times as would imply a limit and a pernicious concern for the temporal. Nothing must damage the spontaneity of the present moment in this place. Dress will be optional in quantity and quality. Facilities for contemplation and solitude will be available. For the rest, Joan Littlewood’s ideas are suggestive, and R.D. Laing’s for a therapeutical situation for schizophrenics are entirely in line with those proposed by sigma. From the very beginning we must be in touch with the more enlightened members of the establishment, keeping them in formed and impressing them with the profound importance of our experiment: sooner or later we must have their active participation.

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Since we are concerned to know how we behave, we shall exploit every reproductive technique (audio-video), integrating it as discreetly as possible into structure and decor. Obviously, the original “box-office” must be imperfect and very limited, but it should open soon into a theatre of operations in the country (our “shadow city”) and eventually into civilization if our historical judgement is correct.

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Conventional art forms are no longer adequate for their cultural function of symbolizing and inspiring the spiritual climate of the times. How could they be? A wooden plough will no longer solve our agricultural problem. Every psycho-therapist knows that an alienated man must be brought back to participation. Similarly, the conventionally passive audience must be brought back to collaborate in the making of the cultural moment (as did the masons during the building of the great Gothic cathedrals), transcending time, that abusive symbol to which they have fallen victim in the ordinary business of living, and, very present, as were those distant ancestors in a religious place, come to feel revolt in their own meat.

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McClure: “Revolt happens when the mind and body and almost voiceless tiny cries of the tissues rebel against an overlay of unnaturalities frozen into the nervous system”, It is precisely these unnaturalities our situation-making is constructed to unfreeze.

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Again, from the beginning, using all kinds of props (futiques) to stimulate the creative faculties of participants, we shall function internationally as a lettrist clearing house (L.Ferlinghetti has publicly volunteered his City Lights bookshop as a clearing house for sigma material in San Francisco, cf. City Lights Annual, 1964) and general culture agency. Using the mails for transmission, experimental concordia will be initiated on an international scale (“potlatch”) from (eventually) more than one box-office, and experimental happenings the world over will be reported on in such polemica! vehicles as The Moving Times.

Once our sound-mechanisms are installed, we can experiment with making tapes of spontaneous confrontations with visiting creative artists. We expect the whole experiment to snowball internationally; we must be ready to handle it without manhandling it.

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The stage of evolution we have reached in this latter half of the 20th Century is at a point where life must go forward governed approximately by intelligence or not at all. That is at least part of the reason why we have decided now to create experimental! conditions such that modes of behaviour proper to an intelligently governed life on this earth are called into play by them. The box-office will be a primitive micro-model of a possible future. For we must learn how we shall have to be and do if we are to be and do together at all, without loosing all manner of fata! destruction upon ourselves. NOW.

The sigma box-office will be open to those wishing to take part in an international experiment along these lines.

Certain hallucinatory properties of drugs make them central and urgently relevant to any imaginative enquiry into the mystery of the human mind. Unfortunately, ignorance, hysteria and sensationalism have contributed to making this largely a police matter. It is imperative that such a vital question be taken out of the hands of the police forthwith and that a really comprehensive public enquiry be got underway. In the next issue of The Moving Times, therefore, we shall attempt to stimulate public interest by the publication of two letters from doctors on marijuana (hashish), letters which were inspired by the imprisonment of one of their colleagues on a charge found proven of possession, letters rejected by the editor of Lancet on the grounds that the journal did not wish to seem to take sides. We print only one of them in full, the shorter for convenience:

Dear Sir,

A wave of hysteria appears to have gripped the authorities and the popular press on the issue of marijuana. They seem to believe that this substance is dangerous and that members of the public must be protected from it. People who smoke it are being sent to prison as if they were dangerous criminals and last week in Glasgow (Letter dated 2nd June, 1964) a doctor was sentenced to six months imprisonment for being in possession of a quantity. In these circumstances should not the medical profession through its representatives try to stem the panic by placing the facts on marijuana before the public? Marijuana, far from being dangerous, appears to me to be completely harmless and under certain circumstances beneficial. It is non-addictive and unlike nicotine and ethyl alcohol it has no known deleterious physiological effects. Psychologically, it is known to enhance perception and there is no scientifically respectable evidence to suggest that it causes any harm morally or mentally. On the contrary, there is evidence to suggest it may be useful in psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and states of depersonalisation and derealisation. True, those who smoke it sometimes fall foul of the law but this is simply because smoking it is illegal. If the law was changed these people would not transgress, and since the law in this matter is based on a total misunderstanding of the effects of marijuana, is it not time that this change was made?

Yours sincerely

A. Easterson, MB, ChB, DPM

Dr R.D.Laing wrote the other rejected letter which ended with the observation:

“I would be far happier if my own teenage children would, without breaking the law, smoke marijuana when they wished, rather than start on the road of so many of their elders to nicotine and ethyl! alcohol addiction”. And how many more letters of this kind, rejected by this publication and others, before and since? Vital informations of this kind must be kept in the public domain, the more publicly the better. The man who fears freedom is death’s fellow-traveller and has in his madness planted gallows’ trees in five continents. At the edge of the pit, with no coherent understanding of his own processes and society’s, he is negative, destructively critical, often belligerently incredulous. He sees no way of clearing up the mess which he calls reality and is hysterically afraid of disorder which he habitually associates with violence forgetting, as he does, that the most outrageous violence of this century has been “ordered violence”, like that daily minuet into the gas chambers circa 1940.

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Just for this reason…nevertheless, in opposing such a “man” we should never lose sight of the fact that he is an abstraction of our own thinking processes, and we must take care that in judging such abstractions we don’t commit the perennial impertinence of translating our theory into’ the corpses of our “enemies”. Men exist. Enemies don’t. And it seems to us that when men come to free themselves of all the insane usurptions of limiting language then and only then will the broad identity of interest of all living men and women become self-evident.

Meanwhile, we regard it as only good. sense to set aside our counsels of despair. The revolt in which we are involved is happening. We are making it happen and it is making us happen. We are sure of our own power as something which is to be realised, not seized…in ourselves:..now, remembering we were born to live, not to “prepare for life”. That is our dialectic.

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We should like you to continue to receive the kind of thing contained in this first sigma folder. Wallace Berman of California in 1956 was the first to my knowledge to “distribute his.work” in this way. He might probably have said that is a false way of putting it, the “distribution” being part of the “work” which was, rather “play”, did undoubtedly, so very like a Bedouin chief entertaining in the gesture of passing one of his “found objects” for one’s examination. He had a flair for finding things. And he had a flair for teaching others to do so. The idea is (among other things) to cut out the brokers. To evade the economic “processing” involved in being dealt with by a publisher who takes his identity as a publisher too seriously. Who brings his “reality” into the equation and interferes with the vital flow of informations. The ordinary publisher must subject the facts of communication to the contingent historical fact of making a living in capitalist society. Now, it is clear he has per se no useful function in the future we envisage. And unfortunately it seldom occurs to him that he might have a much more vital function in a more vital future (for his expertise is not lost), He sees only what he stands to lose. And he may fight to the death to retain it. It is the function of our general informations service to get through to that man and ultimately to all men and women.

Alexander Trocchi

• Wikipedia on Alexander Trocchi

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