March comes in like a lamb (to the slaughter)

 

By Andrew W. Griffin

A few years back, when I was still running the original Dust Devil Dreams blog on my Red Dirt Report site, I wrote quite a bit about writer, intellectual and mystic Arthur Koestler.

I recall mentioning that Koestler – author of The Roots of Coincidence (1972) and The Ghost In The Machine (1967) – had influenced many in the Baby Boomer generation, including singer/songwriter/bassist Gordon “Sting” Sumner, whose band The Police released a Koestler-inspired album Ghost In The Machine in 1981, two years before their final album – Synchronicity – released in 1983.

And it was 39 years today – March 1, 1983 – when Koestler, suffering from Parkinson’s disease, took his own life, just a few months before The Police released Synchronicity, furthering interest in the works of Carl Jung.

Coincidentally, or not, my sync pal Christopher Knowles, at The Secret Sun, posted on the same day a meme-friendly post titled “Got Them World War Meme Blues Again, Mama.”

Knowles was lamenting the sad state of affairs in the world, with Russia and Ukraine at each other’s throats. He then noted how the Cocteau Twins singer Elizabeth Fraser announced the forthcoming release of a new album, featuring, well, I’ll let him tell it …

“Hey, remember last Monday when World War Three pretty much started up? Well, guess who announced her first new record in 13 years the day before? 

Aw, you guys are good.

That's the cover art on the left. Which looks unsettlingly like a mushroom cloud superimposed over someone's head. Very Episode 8 in a way. Given, you know, the past forty-plus years of this kind of thing I'm not entirely convinced that this situation in Ukraine isn't going to escalate into something more grave.”

Meanwhile, my blog post yesterday was "Mushroom clouds," noting how it was Marshallese Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day, in memory of those affected or killed as a result of the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb test on Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands on 3/1/54 (2/28/54 in the US).

Eerie in light of my first post for this blog was about both Twin Peaks and my noting of the July 16, 1945 atomic bomb test in New Mexico, noted in Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return as the event that allowed the veil to be pierced. It was fucking art and the absolute truth.


War drums are beating again. Oddly, when I was writing about Koestler back in 2014, I was also writing quite a bit about the Russian incursion into Crimea and the rise of fascism on a global scale.And here we are again. Dark days, indeed.

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