A Necktie (hemp preferably) For A Two-Headed Idiot

Review:  Necktie For A Two-Headed Tadpole: A Modern Day Alchemy Book by Jason Murk (Oscura Press, 2006)

I don't remember where I saw a reference and recommendation for this book.  I bought it because I don't pay shipping at Amazon.com unless I absolutely have to and I needed something to fill out my order beyond the necessary $25 required to get free shipping.  There is a price to pay for being cheap.

Jason Murk is without a doubt extremely bright, perhaps even of genius quality.  It is a great sadness to see the gift warped.  He smoked one too many funny cigarettes (at least) and stared at far too many  "whorling whorlding" vortices (yes, he actually wrote that).

I know, I know.... most of his art is in the smug satire -  the intentional, post-modern, anti-literary literary deconstructionalist ," take nothing I say seriously though I am intending it very seriously"  writing style.  His book is intended for "insiders", those that "get-it".  He wishes to attain the summit like peak of guru-ism dispensing his truths in conflated phrases that are seemingly nonsense unless you penetrate and prosper.  Oh Lord, help us... there may be more of them where he came from and if they multiply like rabbits there is little hope for sanity.

Murk's general topic if any kind of logic is to be assigned to it at all, is "creativity."  His artistic soul, sensitive as it is, was ever aware and observant of details, supposedly insignificant details, which his fancy then linked together to form "stories"  - this was the loci of his "creativity."  What am I speaking of?  He would stare at the patterns of a worn upholstered bus seat and see patterns in the "whorls and wrinkles."  From there his imagination would resolve these patterns into images and even link them together into incipient occult figures or lines of thought.   It was not a distant journey to the world of Tarot and other "creative" activities.  He took up old alchemy books and was fascinated by the woodcut figures and the range of "teachings" that could come from meditating on their symbology and sequence.

(I always get something from things I read and I appreciated this aspect of Murk's journey.  I would have never noticed the things he noticed and I did see how a continuum of "meaning" could be assigned to the various depictions.  I submit that all good art possesses this quality and it is one of my favorite past-times in an art museum to allow myself to be "drawn-into" a good painting.  If Murk had kept this in check and gone no further I would be writing something entirely different.)

However, the sworls and whooshes got out of hand.  He describes a "nervous breakdown" when the activities of his imagination brought him close to losing the distinctions between his imagination and the real world of fast-moving cars that pay no attention to the world  of dreams and metaphysical imagining.  This "death" became his new birth and he awakened to a sober analysis of the life he was living and like any good existentialist he decided it was not authentic and therefore like any good zealot he undertook to find his own leather belt and locust-eating role of a prophet.  He did what every creative person (in his thinking) ought to do.  He told his corporate boss to shove it and he went off in the desert to live an unwashed (literally), convenience rejecting existence, staring at the blue sky and reveling in his creative juices.  It was the supreme triumph of "it's all about me", the mantra of many and the death knell of civilization.

All this is conveyed to us in the wrappings of smugly inscrutable, tongue-in-cheek (I suppose) "parables" and "treatises".  Let me just give you a sample of some of it. 

And so, what is art?  Art?  No, wait, I mean creativity.  And so what is creativity?  Creativity is brilliant, like any burst of bright illumination_ and during the moment of creation, when you're coming to new ideas, when you're creating- ideas are burning meteors, no, they're Persian meteors (????), no they're singing fireflies but whatever they are they're fast and you have to catch them fast before they burn gaping great Persian meteor holes through your firefly net. ( I am not making this up) And the creative experience is so overwhelming that you can't capture it, and in this moment, the creator becomes selfless, for a moment at least.

Did you follow that?  I thought so.  If you want more of that, fill your boots.  If you want to hear a drugged out, pseudo-intellectual who was born out of synch with the hippie generation, then buy the book.  But the bottom line is it doesn't take a genius to tell us that corporate America generates pressures on those who pursue its goals.  Those pressures can dominate and crush you like a grape.  You can be molded by the forces and culture to the point where you discover that something precious is being stifled or has already been killed.  There are many ways to deal with this and not all of them include rejecting the whole scene.

Murk is intoxicated with his own drama and is way too quick to project the patterns of his own life into the form of wisdom universally applicable to other souls, sensitive or not.  I have heard better philosophy from a gushing drunk leaning on a bar in one of the many establishments I have visited.  I have even contributed to the genre myself.  But when I sobered up I knew that it was just the liquor talking.  Murk may have overcome his drug habit, perhaps not, but I am not sure that the recovery is complete.

Comments

[TeaQuaffer]

Sounds like a book I won't be readin' for a while
Though your review did induce a smile.
I won't know to what he does refer-
'Cause his language is so very quite obscure.
Guess one could say it's written in a Murk-y style!

[Arch Van Devender]

Murk-y is as Murk-y does
and that without restraint
He heaps his language with pounds of fuzz
but cannot a pleasing picture paint.

[Ben]

It seems a good book. I would love to read.