Clipping from the Texarkana News, 5/7/1904

Just finished Pop. 1280 by Jim Thompson, [born in 1906 in Anadarko, Oklahoma], which I highly recommend.  The French film noir, Coup de Torchon, with which I am unfamiliar, is said to be based on it.  Thompson will remind some of you of Georges Simenon, and in a very low-rent fashion his narrator may also bring to mind Highsmith's Ripley.  Reading Pop. 1280 also has echos of Flannery O'Connor.  Good times!

Curiously, two writers I am also reading right now -- Jean Gebser and Neville Goddard -- were both born in 1905, which makes me think that I am literally moving out of my 1904 phase and into something else, which as you know it has been my plan to do, and as you are also aware, I take my signs wherever I can get them.

Jean Gebser (1905-1973) is the author of The Ever Present Origin [Ursprung und Gegenwart, (1949 and 1953),  English translation Noel Barstad with Algis Mickunas, 2 vols in 1, Ohio University Press, 1997].  According to the introductory remarks, Gebser's work takes the pessimism and notion of a "demise" of Western culture as presented in the work of writers like Spengler ("Decline and Fall of the West") and shifts perspective, choosing to interpret the "crisis" instead as a restructuring, and "the birth of a new consciousness," a "new and universal perception of the world" that would "overcome the inner division of contemporary man who... thinks only in dualisms." 

Given my recent reading of Eckart Tolle, as you can imagine, Gebser had me at "demise."  I am not very far into Vol 1, but I will keep you posted. 

More accessible is my old friend Neville, (Neville Goddard, 1905-1972) about whom you can read in the link under his name to an article regarding his place in the New Thought Movement.   Neville settled here in Los Angeles in the 1950s and "gave a series of talks on metaphysics on television and for many years he lectured regularly to capacity audiences at the Wilshire Ebell Theater"... on "creative visualization and the transformation of consciousness." [from the book jacket].

You may wonder how all of this fits together.  What, you may ask, does the violence of Jim Thompson's Southern sheriff or the awful plight of the Pugh and Pillow children and that streetcar have to do with metaphysics and a new consciousness?  And I could respond by saying that "1904" is nothing more than a framing device for the presentation of material there'd be utterly no excuse for otherwise.  

Or I could tell you this: that everything, the whole world, can change in a heartbeat; that Grace can come when you least expect it; that it's time for a radical transformation, but there's a price to pay for it; that the birth of a whole new way of thinking, a whole new perspective, isn't always cosy or pretty or safe.