in an attempt to keep better track of the things I read this year, I’ll be writing, however much I feel like, about each of the things I read this year. the first book I finished was VALIS by PKD, which I briefly posted about a few days ago. then, in the days after finishing it, I had what can only be referred to as a kind of “episode” that made the nervous breakdown PKD describes in the novel seem a little too real. not that the book itself precipitated a psychotic break or anything, nor would I call what happened to me such; all of my intellectual efforts to that point were aimed at attaining a megalomaniacal ability to organize fringe ideas and esoterica into a coherent perception of history, time, and language, so as to structure my fiction writing efforts around evincing the paranoid worldview in its myriad iterations while simultaneously saying something “true” about psychology, humanity, art, technology, politics, economics, trauma, and so on. easy peasy lemon squeezy, right?
today I wrapped up a personal favorite of PKD’s, Julian Jaynes’s watershed classic The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. the copy I owned has sat on my shelf for I don’t even know how long at this point, and, ironically, once I picked it up, I tore through it in only about a week and half. having owned the thing, I obviously was aware of the basic thesis Jaynes puts forth, but in case my faithful readers are not, it’s a fairly straightforward idea with extremely profound implications: only a few millennia ago, humans did not possess “consciousness” as we do today, but instead, when conditioned habit could not adequately address a novel situation, they were commanded by hallucinated voices. these voices are where we got the idea that there are gods governing the world. “consciousness” arose in the centuries when the authority of these voices was undermined by population growth, increased cultural interchange, and mass migrations.
I’m not going to outline the case Jaynes makes here, as that would amount to me rewriting the book, something I do not care to do. what I will say is that, even if Jaynes isn’t entirely “right,” or if there are bits of the book that strain credulity, the overwhelming feeling I got from reading this work was of having found a puzzle piece I’ve been desperately searching for. the peculiar evolution of Greek and Hebrew philosophy, the drastically varying senses of human psychology presented by different historical eras, the idea that language is founded on perception-altering metaphor, the role of the Muses in artistic creation, the archaic power of poetry, all these and more are brilliantly elucidated through the lens of Jaynes’s theory. this & David Graeber’s Debt are easily the two works I most recently read that fundamentally shifted my conception of the world.
anyway, I’m taking a little break from marijuana because my fundamental conception of the world seems to be pretty easily shifted, and also neo-Jungian depth therapy is proving to be one hell of a drug on its own.
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